an occasional reader

Credit Card Defaults Are Just Beginning

One positive: all those annoying Visa pumpers seem to have abandoned these forums.

The fact that credit card debt is "known" to be risky will not keep the stocks from falling further when issuers (COF) announce additional charge-offs, write-downs, and reserves and transaction processors (V, MA) announce diminished activity.

In fact, I think the surprise here is how little these stocks have fallen given the iceberg that they are headed toward.

Today the market is down in part because retail sales came in relatively weak. But certainly a weak consumer at this point is not a surprise. Evidently that knowledge was NOT already priced in...