Last October, the Federal Reserve’s Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices showed a net 8.2% of large banks reporting they had tightened credit standards on credit card loans over the prior three months. By January and February,…
Author: Alfred Dunn
The yield curve un-inverted. It’s a wonky phrase that makes most people’s eyes glaze over, but if you’re sitting on a car loan from 2022 or 2023, it’s worth paying attention. The spread between 2-year and 10-year Treasury yields—the market’s…
The yield curve—the gap between the 10-year and 2-year Treasury note—has been upside down since July 2022. That’s the longest stretch of inversion in U.S. history. Now, in late 2024, it’s flipping back. The 10-year yield has climbed above the…
Last March, I was tracking the S&P/LSTA Leveraged Loan Index default rate when a cluster of CLO resets hit their test dates simultaneously. By September, three mid-cap companies in those CLO pools announced workforce reductions totaling 4,200 jobs. The resets…
When a bank sets aside money for credit card loans it thinks will sour, it’s not guessing. It’s reading a set of early-warning signals most people never see—delinquency roll rates, payment velocity, utilization thresholds, and macroeconomic overlays. These numbers land…
When a bank drops its quarterly earnings, everyone races to the headline numbers—revenue, net income, earnings per share. But if you’re trying to figure out where consumer credit is actually headed, you need to dig a little deeper. Tucked into…
Credit card loss provisions are the line item in bank earnings that tell you when lenders expect borrowers to stop paying. A provision is not a realized loss. It’s a forward-looking accrual that hits the income statement now, based on…
You open the envelope expecting the usual. The assessed value on your home—the number the county swears represents its worth—hasn’t budged. Yet the total due is up by hundreds of dollars. No revaluation. No addition. Just a bigger bill. The…
Banks don’t guess when they set aside money for loans that might go bad. They book a provision for credit losses, a line item that moves before a single account charges off. Under the current expected credit loss (CECL) standard,…
If you bought I Bonds in 2021, your fixed rate is 0.0%. That number is baked in for the full 30-year life of the bond. It never changes. The only thing that adjusts every six months is the inflation-linked variable…
When the Bank of Canada moves its overnight rate, the headline is instant. What isn’t instant—and what actually touches your money—is the quiet repricing of your home equity line of credit. There’s a 72-hour window where the rate you see…
When money gets expensive and lenders get stingy, the pain isn’t spread evenly. Big companies with treasury teams and revolving credit lines can shrug off a couple hundred basis points of tightening. Small businesses—the ones with fewer than 50 employees,…