The drop in credit card balances nationally since 2009 have had more to do with consumers paying down their card balances than from card issuers charging off delinquent card accounts.
That is the central conclusion of an analysis that TransUnion, one of the three large credit bureaus, conducted of consumer debt data collected by the Federal Reserve. The conventional wisdom among many card analysts was that charge-offs, not changes in consumer behavior, had been behind the national balance decline.
According to the analysis, which the credit bureau described as "conservative," consumers made more than $72 billion more in payments on their credit cards between the first quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010 than they made purchases with those cards. The firm said that if it used less conservative assumptions, consumers made more than $110 billion more in payments than purchases on their cards during the same period.
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