Surging Personal Credit

Here are a couple of reports that are interesting in a reading-the-tea-leaves kind of sense: MasterCard announced its quarterly earnings yesterday and ended up far ahead of the analysts' estimates. Its third-quarter income came in at $3.94 a share, easily beating the estimate of $3.54 a share. Last week, MasterCard's rival Visa announced its quarterly revenue was up a whopping 51 percent.

Remember, these aren't the banks that issue these cards who are reporting these earnings. Visa and MasterCard are relatively small companies that process payments for member banks. Despite the fact that it serves 23,000 financial institutions worldwide, MasterCard itself has only about 5,000 employees.

So what we're looking at here is the growth in the use of credit and debit cards by consumers. Worldwide, Mastercard said that spending using one of its cards had grown by 7.9 percent, to $514 billion, in the past quarter. That kind of consumer spending and increased consumer confidence can only be good for our economy.