From Reuters: Capital One Credit Card Defaults Fall, but BofA’s Rise Capital One said the annualized net charge-off rate — debts the company believes it will never collect — for U.S. credit cards fell to 10.19 percent in February from 10.41 percent in January. … However, Bank of America said…

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 identity theft, so I checked it on annualcreditreport.com and…

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 said the annualized net charge-off rate — debts the company…

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 possible future slowdown in production. From the NY Fed: Empire…

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. … The percentage of people delinquent on their mortgages but current…

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 week,” says Pat O’Connor, 57, a Connecticut carpenter. With no…

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 on mortgages first surpassed the percentage of consumers current…

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 because the credit card issuers have been raising interest…

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, which is probably a good long-term trend but some…

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 the following chart (click to enlarge) showing the year-over-year…