With the 2024 presidential race getting close to the home stretch, both candidates are throwing out ideas about how to handle the economy. Kamala Harris is expected to roll out new economic policy proposals Wednesday. And former president Donald Trump, last week, pledged he would instate a temporary 10% cap on credit card interest rates if reelected.
That's the sort of pledge you might expect to hear from a Democrat like Elizabeth Warren, but Trump spoke out last Wednesday against rates that currently can average higher than 30% for store credit cards and hover around 20% for national cards.
Trump's not alone. There has been more talk in Washington, D.C., about putting a ceiling on credit card interest rates in recent years, but how likely is a cap and could one work? Here's what to know.
According to the most recent Household Debt and Credit report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Center for Microeconomic Data, Americans were carrying $1.14 trillion in credit card debt at the end of the second quarter of 2024, up $27 billion from the previous quarter. In the fourth quarter of 2019, that figure stood at $927 billion.