Credit Card Delinquency

Credit cards are usually the first debt households fall behind on when budgets tighten — before auto loans, before mortgages. Rising delinquencies signal consumer financial stress before it shows up in retail sales or jobless claims, making this one of the cleanest early reads on household balance-sheet health. When the rate climbs alongside softening labor data, it's the classic late-cycle setup where consumer spending — the engine of the US economy — starts to buckle. This card tracks the all-commercial-banks aggregate (DRCCLACBS), the standard headline measure. The companion small-banks card (DRCCLOBS, banks outside the top 100 by assets) isolates the subprime-heavier cohort whose stress historically shows up earliest — read the two together to see whether bottom-of-distribution borrowers are pulling ahead of the aggregate.