Credit Trouble Bites Consumers Hard

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 3, 10:31AM EDT

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Sometimes it takes experts a quarter or two to catch up with the real world. The American Bankers Association reports that during the fourth quarter of last year consumer credit payments fell behind more than they have at any time since 1992. The bucket of loans referenced includes credit cards, auto loans, and home equity lines.

According to Bloomberg "Late loans climbed 21 basis points to 2.65 percent of all accounts in a consumer-loan index created by the group." Hardly a surprise.

What is not so obvious is that the Ph.Ds hired be Wall St. have built derivatives around these segments of consumer credit just as they did with subprime loans. It is a matter of time before this paper loses enough of its value for the problems to become an issue in the quarterly reports of financial companies.

Today, no one knows what the full extent of the fall-out from these deteriorating loans may be. It is most certainly another straw on the camel’s back

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.