Americans are falling behind on their bills. Wall Street is alarmed.

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Signs that Americans are struggling to keep up with their bills are setting off alarms on Wall Street. Shares of consumer-lending companies slid this past week after executives raised warnings about lower-income borrowers who are struggling to make payments.

Dour remarks from banking executives at the Barclays banking conference rattled investors, who were already on edge about the health of the U.S. economy. Investors have been on high alert for any clues that a recession is in store after two years of higher interest rates.

The Federal Reserve is expected to start lowering rates at its meeting this coming week, but some investors fear it might have waited too long. Here is what bank executives are telling us about how people are faring. On top of soaring prices for groceries and just about everything else, people have been dealing with higher interest rates on their credit cards.

The average rate as of May was 21.51%, according to Fed data, up from around 15% in 2019. That helps explain why some are finding it harder to keep up with payments, particularly those who don’t earn so much. Around 9.1% of credit-card balances turned delinquent over the past year, the highest rate in over a decade, according to an August report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

“In general, this has been a bigger issue for people in the bottom half of the income spectrum," said Moshe Orenbuch, an analyst at TD Cowen. Mark Mason, chief financial officer at Citigroup, said at the Barclays conference that his bank has seen delinquencies picking up and more consumers carrying balances. Where there is growth in spending, he said it is driven primarily by Citi’s affluent customers.