The share of US card debt 90 days past due has sat near 7% for five straight quarters
Trump claims the U.S. economy is booming like never before, yet serious credit-card delinquencies are at their highest rate since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
This shows that Americans are struggling to pay their bills, which is consistent with bad, not good times.
The share of US credit card debt more than 90 days past due was 7.1% in the first quarter of 2026. It has barely moved through five quarters in the low sevens, and it sits below the 7.2% of the fourth quarter of 2024.
On level, Schiff is right. Outside the years right after the financial crisis it has not been this high. On direction he is not. The reading has been flat for five quarters and is below where it stood a year and a half ago. The claim that things are getting worse right now does not come out of this number.
Checked 2026-08-04 · Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Household Debt and Credit Report for Q1 2026, released 2026-05-12
Delinquency is the highest since the aftermath of the crisis. Americans cannot pay their bills, which contradicts talk of a boom.
The level is high and has been parked there for five quarters. This is not deterioration in progress, it is a plateau at a high place.
The same 7% splits depending on whether you read its height or its slope.
Counting money against counting people
Two different figures circulate for the same quarter. TransUnion put credit card delinquency of 90 days or more at 2.5% for the first quarter of 2026, close to three times below the New York Fed figure. Both are correct. They count different things. The New York Fed measures overdue balances as a share of all card balances. TransUnion measures overdue borrowers as a share of all card borrowers. People who fall behind tend to owe more, so counting by money produces a much larger share. Without checking which figure is on the table, two people can describe the same quarter in opposite terms.
US consumer credit market increasingly splitting along a K shaped path (TransUnion, 2026-04-30)The top and the bottom are pulling apart
What TransUnion points at is not the average but the split. The super prime tier grew to 40.7% of consumers by the fourth quarter of 2025, up 3.8 percentage points from the fourth quarter of 2019. At the other end the subprime tier is growing and the middle is thinning out. A flat headline delinquency rate can be the arithmetic of an improving top offsetting a deteriorating bottom. One average line hides that motion. Schiff's sentence and any rebuttal that answers it with the average alone share the same blind spot. Card balances themselves stand at $1.252 trillion, down $25 billion on the quarter and up $70 billion on the year. The denominator under that percentage keeps growing.
The August release of the Q2 report decides it
The next print settles this argument. The New York Fed publishes the same report every quarter, and second quarter data lands within August. A reading above 7.5% ends five quarters of flatness and hands the direction to Schiff. A reading below 7.5% means the plateau held. Neither outcome changes the level, which is the highest stretch since 2011. Whether things are getting worse and whether they are already bad are separate questions, and today's data answers the second one.
- Read as a level, Schiff's sentence stands. Read as a direction, it does not.
- Figures nearly three times apart, 7.1% and 2.5%, describe the same quarter, so check first whether a number counts money or people.
- The next call belongs to the New York Fed's second quarter report due in August.
Scheduled for gradingAwaiting grading
Sources
- Original Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) · 2026-08-02
- Source for the check block Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Household Debt and Credit Report Q1 2026 · released 2026-05-12 · checked 2026-08-04
- Cross-check TransUnion quarterly credit industry insights report · 2026-04-30
Checked 2026-08-04. New York Fed figures run through Q1 2026, and the TransUnion tier shares are as of Q4 2025.