Bankers to Consumers: Beware the Wealth Gap , By Suzanne Woolley January 21, 2015
With consumer sentiment at an 11-year high, credit card delinquencies at a record low, the real estate market stable, and the job market looking better, you might think it's safe to open your wallet a little. And that has bankers worried. From their vantage point, what looks good on the ground right now could lead to economic trouble down the road. At the top of their list of worries: a wealth gap in the U.S. that could stymie consumer spending and demand for credit. That would hurt economic growth (and, of course, their employer's profits).
The quarterly survey put out by the Professional Risk Managers’ Association and FICO, the credit analytics company, is a financial professional's worry list. The bank risk officers who answer it have pored over consumer balance sheets, writ large, for troublesome or encouraging signs. What they see could signal shifts in credit availability for consumers and hint at pricing trends for consumer credit products—whether the interest rate on your credit card seems likely to rise over the next six months, for example. (Many analysts do expect it to rise, by the way.)
While the bank risk managers surveyed are increasingly concerned about the wealth gap's effect on consumer creditworthiness, just what that translates into in reality is murky. The survey asked if respondents agreed that the wealth gap posed a risk to the financial system, and 74 percent agreed, up from 62 percent last quarter.
What does that mean? Well, it ties into the fact that while the job picture is improving, wage growth is a worry, says Andrew Jennings, FICO’s chief analytics officer. Stagnant wages could lead to people getting overextended on credit cards and to higher credit card delinquencies. That sounds bad for banks, but for the overall financial system in the North America? In the long term, sure, it's a big problem. For now, almost 44 percent of those surveyed said the wealth gap hasn't led their institution to change its consumer credit underwriting standards.
The good news is that many of those surveyed do not expect delinquencies on mortgages or home equity lines of credit to rise over the next six months. And this is the second quarter with more respondents expecting student loan delinquencies to stay at the same level, rather than to rise. Beginning in 2011’s first quarter, every survey found more respondents expecting those delinquencies to rise than to stay the same.
Here's what bank risk officers expect our financial challenges to look like in 2015's first half:
Credit cards. They expect us to charge more. The percentage expecting credit card debt to fall is the lowest since the survey was launched in 2010. About 37 expect a small increase in credit card debt in the first half of 2015, and 57.2 percent expect consumers to carry a higher average balance. More than 39 percent expect credit card delinquencies to rise.
Student loans. More jobs for students means paying down loans will stay about as onerous as it already is. About 46 percent of those surveyed predict that the level of student loan delinquencies will stay where it is for the next six months. That outweighs the 44.3 percent expecting delinquencies to rise. And that 46 percent is a gain from 43.8 percent who believed delinquencies would stay the same in last quarter’s survey.
Housing loans. Housing's looking pretty stable. Delinquencies on residential mortgages and home equity lines are expected to stay the same or fall. The percentage of risk officers expecting delinquencies on home equity lines of credit to remain the same was 58.2 percent, up almost 9 points from the third quarter. That increase is the first since the fourth quarter of 2013.