Bleumangue

American Express Drops a Bomb on Consumer Spending

My educationally informed gut feeling is that Amex has finally SHOWN lowered revenues for 12/07 because their charges to POS merchants are considered too high by the latter. Personal experience has shown that more and more stores are refusing to accept my AMEX cards (3) and opting for MC/VS only. Check it out for yourselves! Personally I never argue with actual reality. Discover Card had the same "problem" a few years ago - particularily with gas stations. That said, I don't think that one can extrapolate AMEX woes to MC/VS, unless the medium doing so has a "it bleeds, ir leads" mentality. As for their delinquencies being up in 12/07, I'm sure that that was expected given the fiscal triage history of the average consumer facing foreclosure, enemployment or reduced income flow. I'm kind of glad to see that AMEX (green & gold) may be dragged into the real commerce world. The place where 90% of us really shop. No. it's not Macy's or Nieman Marcus. Good Golly, they may finally even learn the meaning of one of the most important terms in CC applications: No annual fee.