Minneapolis
CNN
—
The resilient consumer has kept the US economic engine running, but it’s coming at a big cost: Americans are piling up record credit card balances, and more and more are falling behind on those payments.
During the third quarter, credit card balances hit a fresh high of $1.08 trillion, rising $48 billion from the prior quarter and leaping by a record $148 billion from the year before, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit released Tuesday.
The year-over-year increase is the largest since the New York Fed started tracking that data in 1999.
Household debt increased 1.3% to $17.29 trillion in the third quarter.
However, a growing number of households are having difficulty…