Earn What You Spend

I’ve written before about the challenges facing the credit card industry - and it looks like these challenges are now showing up in the balance sheets of these companies. Clusterstock summarizes what the rating agency Fitch had to say about the industry today: 
Rising unemployment will push up the losses on credit card portfolios while shrinking [...]

The consumer credit card crisis is underway.
Consumer debt has far outpaced real growth in wages:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Source: Innovest
And we’re beginning to see the ramifications of this.  From this morning’s NYTimes:
After years of flooding Americans with credit card offers and sky-high credit lines, lenders are sharply curtailing both, just as an eroding economy squeezes consumers.
Currently, the total losses amount to [...]

In the newest issue of The Atlantic, Virginia Postrel writes an interesting article, The Case For Debt. I was surprised the author could miss the sea of red flags about too much debt at the consumer, corporate, and national level.  But miss it she did, and in fact she tries her best to make the ‘case’ for [...]