U.S. credit card defaults at highest level since 2010, FT says

Defaults on credit card loans in the U.S. are at the highest level since 2010 amid waning financial health among lower-income consumers, Financial Times’ Stephen Gandel reports. According to industry data from BankRegData, credit card lenders wrote off $46B in seriously delinquent loan balances in the first nine months of 2024 – up 50% from the same period in the year prior, and while banks have yet to report their Q4 numbers, the early signs are that more consumers are falling significantly behind on what they owe, the report states. The article further cites Capital One (COF) having recently stated that as of November its annualized credit card write-off rate – the percentage of its overall loans marked as unrecoverable – hit 6.1%, up from 5.2% a year ago.