Maybe This Helps Explain Why My Credit Card Cut Me Down $10,000 In Available Credit?

[orleans]

(leaving me with a whopping $50 available credit)

Reuters) - The U.S. credit-card industry may pull back well over $2 trillion of lines over the next 18 months due to risk aversion and regulatory changes, leading to sharp declines in consumer spending, prominent banking analyst Meredith Whitney said.

The credit card is the second key source of consumer liquidity, the first being jobs, the Oppenheimer & Co analyst noted.

"In other words, we expect available consumer liquidity in the form of credit-card lines to decline by 45 percent."

Bank of America Corp (BAC.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), Citigroup Inc (C.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) represent over half of the estimated U.S. card outstandings as of September 30, and each company has discussed reducing card exposure or slowing growth, Whitney said.

Closing millions of accounts, cutting credit lines and raising interest rates are just some of the moves credit card issuers are using to try to inoculate themselves from a tsunami of expected consumer defaults.

A consolidated U.S. lending market that is pulling back on credit is also posing a risk to the overall consumer liquidity, Whitney said.

Mortgages and credit cards are now dominated by five players who are all pulling back liquidity, making reductions in consumer liquidity seem unavoidable, she said.

"We are now beginning to see evidence of broad-based declines in overall consumer liquidity."

"Already, we have witnessed the entire mortgage market hit a wall, and we believe it will, for the first time ever, show actual shrinkage over the next few months," she wrote.

The credit card market will be 18 months behind the mortgage market and will begin to shrink by mid-2010, Whitney said.

Whitney also expects home prices to continue falling another 20 percent hurt by lower liquidity. They are down 23 percent from their peak, she said.

"In a country that offers hundreds of cereal and soda pop choices, the banking industry has become one that offers very few choices," Whitney wrote in a note dated November 30.

She also said credit lines to consumers through home equity and credit cards had been cut back from the second-quarter levels.

"Pulling credit when job losses are increasing by over 50 percent year-over-year in most key states is a dangerous and unprecedented combination, in our view," the analyst said.

Most of the solutions to the situation involve government intervention, and all of them require more dilutive capital to existing lenders, she said.

"Accordingly, we continue to be cautious on our outlook on US banks." Continued...

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE4B01HI20081201

[madrchsod]

1. banks are pulling credit from business that are " in trouble."

look for hundreds of business declaring bankruptcy because of lack of lines of credit.

we bail the fuckers out and they keep the money to pay their losses. not one dime goes back into the economy

[kentuck]

2. It's like they are trying to squeeze every dollar out of this economy??

For fear that if they don't take away every available dollar, an inflationary spiral will steal all of our wealth in one fell swoop.

[HereSince1628]

3. No, the easy availability of subprime mortgages was after every dollar

The contraction of credit lines is a consequence of fear that credit card borrowers will try to live off the plastic and be unable to repay.

In other words, credit companies are afraid that THEY will end up paying the last dollar squeezed out of the economy. To prevent that they are reeling in credit lines.

[old mark]

4. Why do we routinely get 4-6 credit card/home loan offers per week?

[SoCalDem]

5. They are always looking for new suckers

:(

[old mark]

8. But we are former suckers - our credit cards are 98% paid off, and the only ones

we will use again are the ones tied to our bank account/credit union.

We once had several maxed cards, now will be completely free of them by spring at the latest.

I might be old and a little odd, but I'm not stupid, and I did not want to pay these bills with my meager retirement money. In a few months they will be only a bad memory.

mark

[lunatica]

6. When you're a behemoth it's hard to grind to a stop

the pea sized brain running the machine has a hard time sending signals to all the limbs to work in unison. It runs mostly on inertia. When in motion it tends to want to continue that motion and it takes a huge amount of counter-acting energy to get reverse the trend.

[lunatica]

7. If they lowered the monthly payments it would probably save them

Instead of paying 29% interest and any arbitrary amount they choose as a minimum payment they could decide to keep their credit lines and lower the minimum payments substantially and most people would make the payments. But evidently the logic of this simply doesn't occur to them. They want to do the opposite, thinking it will save them.

They hoard the golden eggs but kill the goose. That's what greedy people do when they're source of wealth looks like it's cutting back on their profits. They think in terms of getting that profit at whatever cost, not about getting a smaller profit so they can continue to get it forever. I wonder if it's actually a mental defect of some sort. The inability to think in rational terms.

[ihavenobias]

9. Very well said.

:)