For a description of this see "Are We at The Peak of a Minsky Credit Cycle?" by Roubini (July 30, 2007). He explains the 3 stages:

First, sound or “hedge borrowers” who can meet both interest and principal payments out of their own cash flows.
Second, “speculative borrowers” who can only service interest payments out of their cash flows. These speculative borrowers need liquid capital markets that allow them to refinance and roll over their debts as they would not otherwise be able to service the principal of their debts.
Finally, there are “Ponzi borrowers” cannot service neither interest or principal payments. They are called “Ponzi borrowers” as they need persistently increasing prices of the assets they invested in to keep on refinancing their debt obligations.

America delevered from 1929 thru (guessing) the late 1940's. Our re-leveraging proceeded slowly until the great expansion which began in 1982. Since 2000 debt by US households has skyrocketed.

The only ways to delever are inflation, defaults, or economic growth with no new debt (the last is almost impossible in our current economy). The first two work fine, albeit with considerable pain.

In the 1930's we defaulted away our excess debt. For more on the inflationary option see Is the Government deliberately understanding inflation?.

If the US is ending a long Minsky cycle, its resulting economic weakness will probably have large effects on the world geopolitical order. For more on this, read Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987).