While investors and economists are squarely focused on whether the US stock market has bottomed or if this is just a short-squeezing bear market rally, and whether the US economy is still growing or - as the Atlanta Fed GDPNow tracker strongly hints - is rapidly shrinking, a far more troubling problem has emerged for the US economy and the Trump administration: the US consumer, and especially the lower income cohort, is now fully tapped out.

Which should not be news to anyone, and certainly not regular zerohedge readers. After all, for the past few years we have been chronicling how US savings are increasingly shrinking and being replaced with credit card borrowings and other forms of debt, including the insidious Buy Now Pay Later (also known as Burrito Now Pay Later, or BNPL), which we learned is being used for food purchases because millions of Americans can't even afford to pay for their next meal, but they will still use doordash for highly overpriced deliveries!)

And it certainly is not a Trump phenomenon, quite the contrary. Consider the following data from the Philadelphia Fed, which recently showed that the share of active credit card accounts making only the minimum payment hit a series high, 10.75% in third quarter 2024.