Felix Salmon with some interesting analysis that shows perhaps they never really were:
It turns out that while total debt outstanding dropped by $93 billion, charge-offs added up to $83 billion — which means that only 10% of the decrease in credit card debt — less than $10 billion — was due to people actually paying down their balances.
Source: Cardhub
Jake -- just in case the subject comes up again, you might want to know the CardHub data was incorrect. They applied a rate from the Fed chargeoff data, which is for commercial banks only, to the total revolving debt, which is only 1/3 from commercial banks. See http://www.clearonmoney.com/dw/doku.php?id=investment:commentary:2010:05:01-consumer_credit_and_consumer_spending
ReplyDeleteJim Fickett
ClearOnMoney.com