[T]he lucrative lending practices of America’s merchants of debt have led millions of Americans — young and old, native and immigrant, affluent and poor — to the brink. More and more, Americans can identify with miners of old: in debt to the company store with little chance of paying up.

It is not just individuals but the entire economy that is now suffering. Practices that produced record profits for many banks have shaken the nation’s financial system to its foundation. As a growing number of Americans default, banks are recording hundreds of billions in losses, devastating their shareholders.

A must-read article in Sunday’s New York Times evokes Merle Travis’ “Sixteen Tons” to shine a light on the practices that credit-card issuers, mortgage banks, and other issuers have used in recent years to more than triple  the amount of debt carried by the average household (in today’s dollars) over the past 25 years, even as the national household savings rate has dwindled to nothing. I deal with these issues every day in my practice, and yet it still takes me by surprise sometimes to realize how successful the lending industry has been at tilting the playing field in their favor, even at the cost of the economy as a whole.

Gretchen Morgenson’s front-page article is part of a package of stories and interactive features called “The Debt Trap,” about which I hope to write more later.