Jennifer writes in: Yesterday, I received a notice from [my credit card company] that my credit limit had been lowered from $10,000 to $4,000 on my primary credit card. I was immediately worried that my credit had been damaged by … Read More

From Reuters: Capital One credit card defaults rise in January (ht jb) Capital One Financial Corp’s U.S. credit-card defaults rose in January, in a sign that consumers continue to remain under stress, it said in a regulatory filing. Capital One … Read More

The headline number showed improvement, but two key numbers to watch are new orders and inventories. The new order index fell, and the inventory index rose sharply - and the declining gap between new orders and inventory points to a … Read More

From Michelle Singletary at the WaPo: Paying your credit card bill before the mortgage TransUnion … recently released a report showing that an increasing number of consumers are choosing to pay their credit card bills before their monthly mortgages. … … Read More

TIME asks: The Great Recession: Will Construction Workers Survive? Nationally, unemployment fell to 9.7% in January, but in construction it jumped to 24.7% … “In the previous 14 years, I had not been out of work for more than one … Read More

TransUnion today said borrowers, especially in California, continue to focus on credit card payments and ignore their mortgages. This is at least the company’s second study showing the same trend. The percentage of consumers current on credit cards and delinquent … Read More

Earlier today, I read with interest the comments on this Get Rich Slowly article about Suze Orman and the “cash only” movement . In a nutshell, the article advocated (as Suze apparently does now) that people should abandon credit cards … Read More

Outstanding consumer credit fell at a 7.2% annual rate in September with revolving credit (credit cards) tanking even faster at 13.3%, the Federal Reserve reported on Friday. This chart from Calculated Risk shows how consumers have cut back on debt, … Read More

The Federal Reserve today said consumer credit fell at a 5.8% annual pace i n August with revolving credit, such as credit cards, dropping at a 13.1% rate. Non-revolving credit, including auto loans, dipped 1.6%. The blog Calculated Risk published … Read More

From Bloomberg: U.S. Credit-Card Defaults Resume Ascent as Unemployment Worsens (ht Bob_in_MA) Bank of America said write-offs rose to 14.54 percent … That compares with 13.81 percent in July … Citigroup’s soured loans rose to 12.14 percent last month, from … Read More