Our flexible friends are turning on us. Figures from Apacs reveal an increasingly sinister credit card market. The first danger sign is the huge leap in the spend on food and drink in December. It is a Bacchanalian month but in previous years we have funded our thirst and gluttony out of cash in hand, rather than splurging on plastic and hoping for a January pay rise.

Debt experts look for problem behaviour in spenders. It's not the size of your credit card spend that counts, but what you are buying. As soon as everyday bills start creeping on to credit, the alarm bells start ringing. When the bill is for food, the bells are deafening.

The other figures causing consternation relate to how our card habits have changed. Back in 2000, UK consumers put £83.7 billion on to their credit cards. Low interest rates and a hugely competitive credit card market sparked an explosion of cheap deals. The 0 per cent balance transfer was invented at the turn of the millennium, and the rate tart was born. Hopping from card to card, recycling their debt, the tarts' survival depended on the willingness of the credit card industry to play along.

As the scramble for market share continued, the tarts were never short of willing partners. By 2004, 151 different credit cards competed to entice borrowers with introductory rates and the spend for the year reached £122 billion.

Seduced into a plastic frenzy by the lenders' inducements and our own unquenchable desire to spend, this level has not subsided. In 2007, consumers put £123 billion on their cards. To recap, 2007 saw the sub-prime market collapse and the subsequent emergence of a global credit crunch. Stock markets became impossibly volatile and the runaway housing market started to limp. By the summer interest rates had risen five times in one year. Experts tumbled over each other to warn of doom. And yet, still we spend.

But our partners in this crime against prudence are no longer quite so complicit. Egg, one of the original 0 per cent lenders, has withdrawn its cards from some borrowers and itself from the competition. They are not alone. The tarts are finding themselves trapped on expensive rates. Average interest rates on purchases are now 16.6 per cent compared with 14.8 per cent in 2004, 0 per cent deals are practically extinct, and the number of cards on the market has dwindled to 119.

Borrowers have been playing the equivalent of musical chairs with their finances. But the lenders have stopped the music, and the borrowers have failed to notice. It is time to recognise our flexible friend has become our implacable enemy, and change our spending habits fast.

antonia.senior@thetimes.co.uk

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