Quote of the Month:
"Both the Conference Board and the University of Michigan's Index of Consumer Sentiment seem to be signaling a slow improvement in consumer confidence."
| Forecasts & Statistics |
| Product Trends |
| Industry Trends |
| Issue Archive |
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| Recession Over? |
| Preliminary statistics for fourth quarter 2001 indicate that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) halted its slide and actually grew at a 0.2 percent annual rate. Though the increase is tiny and at risk of disappearing through subsequent revisions, the report still confounded analysts who had expected much weaker growth. |
| E-Tailing Was the Big Winner Over the Holiday Season |
| Buoyed by deep discounts and continued strength in consumer spending, retail sales beat the analysts' low expectations for the 2001 holiday shopping season. However, the big success story of this holiday season was the continued growth in internet shopping. |
| Looking Back at Consumer Sentiment in 2001 |
| Both the Conference Board and the University of Michigan's Index of Consumer Sentiment seem to be signaling a slow improvement in consumer confidence. This is welcome news for growth prospects in the coming months, although the modest gains hardly signal a return to optimism. |
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| Citibank Offers Credit Reports to Student Cardholders |
| In a clever move that serves both issuer and cardholder interests, Citibank has begun offering a free annual credit report to its college student cardholders. Citibank has partnered with Experian, Inc. to distribute the credit reports and also plans to mass-market credit reports to its student loan customers online. |
| Consumers' Use of Payment Systems |
| In her recent article in the New England Economic Review, Joanna Stavins explores the characteristics of consumers that influence their adoption of various forms of electronic payments. At the outset, she poses a basic question. Since credit cards are more costly for retailers and financial institutions to process than checks or debit cards, why aren't these cost differences passed on to consumers? |
| Swipe and Sip |
| Consumers may now use their credit cards to purchase soft drinks from vending machines. Pepsi has developed a wireless technology that will permit consumers to swipe their credit cards to obtain Pepsi drinks. |
| ATM Innovations |
| Tired of filling out deposit slips, sealing the checks and deposit slip in an envelope and then dumping the envelope into a black hole in a machine? NCR has developed a new machine to reduce frustration. |
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| Credit Cards 2001 |
| CardTrak has just issued its annual summary of the credit card market in 2001. The most significant trend of this past year: the rapid growth of smart cards. |
| Purchase of Providian Portfolio |
| CardLine reports that J. P. Morgan & Chase will buy the $8.2 billion Providian Financial Corp. master trust. The 3.3 million credit card accounts in the portfolio are comprised of $7 billion of platinum accounts and $1.2 billion of standard accounts, according to Chase. |
| Cyclical Performance of Consumer Credit |
| Given that the peak of the most recent business cycle was reached in March 2001, how has the market for consumer credit behaved since that time—especially after September 11? Did outstandings grow more slowly, or even decline? Did delinquencies rise? |
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| Payday Lending Structure Attacked |
| The Office of the Controller of Currency (OCC) has ordered the Eagle National Bank, Upper Darby, PA.to stop providing financing to Dollar Financial Group, one of the nation's largest providers of payday loans. As you may recall from earlier issues of Spotlight, a consumer who obtains a loan from a payday lender essentially borrows against his next paycheck by giving the lender a check for the amount of the loan plus interest. |
| New Reporting Requirements Under HMDA |
| In mid-January the Federal Reserve Board issued its final ruling on proposed changes to Regulation C, which implements the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA). The amendments deal primarily with new requirements to report interest rate data on mortgage loans, but they also modify the reporting rules for the scope of loans covered under HMDA. |
| Roundup of State Privacy Laws Passed in 2001 |
| The 50 states continued an aggressive legislative agenda last year to limit the exchange and use of personally identifiable information. The excellent publication Privacy and American Business reported the following highlights pertaining to ID theft and financial information. |