Back about 1971, when I was living in New York, I tried to rent a station wagon to help carry some of a friend’s stuff from the East Side to the West Side of Manhattan. Being a carless New Yorker, a very common species, I went to a rental agency (Avis, I think) and asked if I could rent a car. I had lots of folding money on me, maybe $200, and was wearing a suit. But the rental clerks refused to rent me the vehicle except via a credit card, which I did not have. It seemed rather exotic, and up until that point unnecessary.

So I called up a cousin of mine working as a junior officer at the now-deceased Chemical (often called Comical) Bank and asked if he could expedite a card for me. He could, which was very nice of him, especially since my bank was another one, the Bank of New York — founded by Alexander Hamilton! (It was a gray-flanneled manager at the latter who told me that I needed to “establish” a credit rating. I did this by borrowing $500 from the stodgy old place and then paying it back with interest within a month but have generally been in debt to somebody ever since.)

These were the old days, when banks’ main business was simply to take deposits and then lend out the money, rather than speculate in always exciting derivatives. I subwayed downtown and my cousin greeted me on a windswept plaza in front of his bank’s skyscraper and handed me a brand-new oil-based card. (I still have the direct descendant of that card now, after a series of bank mergers.)

Good-hearted but sometimes rather a wise guy, he told me: “We’re going to make a lot of money off these cards. The secretaries are going to go off to Bloomingdale’s, buy too much stuff they can’t afford and run a nice fat balance every month, at nice high rates.” The secretaries complied with his wishes! So did a lot of other people, which has been good for the banks because technology has been eliminating secretaries all over the place, not to mention many of the rest of us, particularly journalists.

A few years later, he went off to work as a merchant banker, a much sexier field of banking, in China, Latin America and other “emerging markets” before dying at 46 after going for a run in Hong Kong. His clients included those who would invite him to banquets to feast on monkey brain and who had a rather more supple view of business ethics than might be found in the West, even on Wall Street. But — hey! — these were “emerging” markets.

Always enthusiastic, he would have been impressed today by how much the credit-card trade has flourished. But then, they’re convenient to use and they give you handy (especially for taxes) monthly and annual records. But that they are so easy to use in a society where quick material satisfaction is demanded, even at the cost of what were once considered usurious interest rates, has led to a once slow-motion, now accelerating, disaster.

Households now average about $10,000 in credit-card debt. Joblessness is rising and many consumers are finding it difficult to borrow money. For one thing, many consumers owe more on their houses than the houses are worth on the market.

Banks, which have been co-conspirators in the credit-card mania, have very belatedly started to lower credit limits and stanch the flow of their credit-card offers — especially to young people suckered into the dream of unlimited buying. Bankers seem to have finally woken to the fact that, unlike with mortgages, the institutions stuck with credit-card deadbeats can’t seize and sell real estate to get back some of their money. When a credit-card customer goes bankrupt, the banks must usually wait in line with many, many other creditors.

The credit-card blowback will be bad — albeit not as bad as the mortgage mess, I hope. If something good is to come out of all this it is that more people will know more clearly what they’re spending. For almost four decades, credit-card debt has been a jolly deal for the banks, while a source of episodic euphoria and simmering panic for their customers. Now what?

— Robert Whitcomb