Overdue credit-card payments held steady in March

Overdue debts at the six largest U.S. credit-card lenders held steady in March, remaining at the highest level since November 2004, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Payments late by at least 30 days averaged 4.11 percent of loans in March, the same as in February, according to reports filed by American Express Co., Bank of America Corp., Capital One Financial Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Discover Financial Services.

``I'd be surprised if we're at the peak for late payments,'' Nigel Gault, research director at Lexington, Massachusetts-based Global Insight Inc., said in an interview. ``Pressures on the consumer are increasing, with employment declining, home prices continuing to fall, and prices outpacing wages.''

Late and uncollectible credit-card loan rates will worsen this year as the U.S. economy slows, analysts said. Consumers who can no longer tap home-equity loans are turning to plastic to fuel their lifestyles, Moody's Investors Service said in February. Employers cut 80,000 workers from payrolls in March, the most in five years, causing more stress for cardholders.

Overdue debts edged 0.02 percentage points higher in February after surging 0.16 percentage points in January. Delinquencies at the six biggest card lenders averaged 3.44 percent in March 2007, according to Bloomberg data.

For the second straight month, Capital One, based in Mclean, Virginia, was the only lender in the group to post a lower delinquency rate in March, declining 0.19 percentage points from February.

Bank of America is based in Charlotte, North Carolina. American Express, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup are based in New York. Discover is based in Riverwoods, Illinois.

American Express was ranked first by the total value of purchases and cash advances to U.S. cardholders in the first half of 2007, according to the Carpinteria, California-based Nilson Report, a trade publication. JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America are the second- and third-largest.

Card issuers choose loans to be packaged into securities, which are then sold to investors. The loans may represent 30 percent to 70 percent of all credit-card debt at each company. The Bloomberg figures are an average of delinquency rates at each of the six lenders that doesn't account for differences in the total size of loans that have been securitized.

While delinquency rates for securitized loans may differ from those reported by lenders at the end of each quarter for all customers, analysts use the data to get an early sense of whether bad credit-card debts are rising or falling.