Congratulations, America! You now have $1 trillion in credit card debt for the first time in history.

That’s quite the achievement. And with variable rates perched at the highest levels going back at least half a century, that debt burden will be increasingly difficult for some borrowers to service, especially once student loan payments resume in Q4.

Credit card balances were $1.03 trillion at the end of the second quarter, according to the New York Fed’s latest household debt report, released on Tuesday.

Recall that card balances were flat at $986 billion in the first quarter. It was the first Q1 in the (relatively short) history of the NY Fed’s data series during which the nation’s credit card balance didn’t fall.

The jump in Q2 from Q1 was around $45 billion, not the largest increase ever, but among the largest.

“After a sharp contraction in the first year of the pandemic, credit card balances have seen seven quarters of YoY growth,” NY Fed researchers including Andrew Haughwout said Tuesday.

Q2’s YoY pace was more than 16%, which Haughwout aptly described as “brisk” — it was actually the second-quickest pace ever recorded.

Delinquency rates are back to pre-pandemic levels, but there’s scant evidence of acute distress. So far, it’s better described as a normalization from “unusually low rates during the pandemic when forbearance, policy-boosts to income and limited consumption opportunities meant borrowers were better positioned to repay their debts,” as the NY Fed put it.

Americans had more than 578 million credit card accounts at the end of the quarter, Tuesday’s release suggested. The figures don’t adjust for joint accounts, so the numbers do overstate the case.

Haughwout noted that there are now 70 million more credit card accounts open compared to pre-pandemic levels. Nearly 70% of Americans had a credit card account in Q2, up 10ppt over the past decade.

Available credit hit a new record near $3.6 trillion, despite a bigger net share of banks reporting tighter standards for credit cards in the latest installment of the Fed’s senior loan officer opinion survey. Somehow, Americans keep getting more and more headroom to spend themselves into oblivion.

As I’m always keen to remind readers, credit itself isn’t a bad thing. On the contrary. Credit represents faith in the future. Without credit, there’s no growth.

That said, all of this feels absurd sometimes. Obviously, the highest inflation in four decades is a contributor to the rising national plastic balance, but one has to wonder how much of what’s being financed at 21% is really necessary and what’s just spending for the sake of it.

How many televisions and iPhones (and on and on), do Americans really need? The “more, more, more” mentality in America is part of the reason humanity continues to exceed the planet’s capacity to support life as we know it. I discussed that at length in the latest monthly letter+.

Even if Americans can service the debt burden, it has the potential to be self-defeating and is anyway indicative of unfathomable waste in the name of consumerism.

Here’s a handy rule of thumb: With the exception of your home, if you can’t buy it (whatever it is) five times over in cash, you can’t afford it. Not really, anyway. If you don’t need it (again, whatever it is), and you’re financing it at 21%, you’re lying to yourself. Full stop. And you’re making an egregious mistake besides. A system that lets you make that mistake is a system that will one day implode.

Separate data released earlier this week showed revolving credit contracted at the end of Q2 for the first time in more than two years.