It's not, though, not even vaguely. The graph represents everyone using COVID money to pay off credit cards, and a cessation of COVID money immediately caused people to pile back into their credit cards. They went from buying zero goods on credit cards to buying everything they can't afford on credit cards. I agree - inflation pushes more things into the category of "things you can't afford" but to say "this is an artifact borne entirely of inflation" is fallacious, facetious and foolish. Go look it up on FRED. Feed in whatever cofactor you want to call "inflation" - I did. The only reason I didn't link it is 1) inflation hasn't been constant so any cofactor you use isn't accurate 2) in order to be accurate inflation would have to be that tracked by FRED and FRED tracks it yearly ...so I can't even construct a graph to demonstrate how wrong you are.