This chart may look cluttered but you don’t have to have all three of the debt types showing at the same time. Clicking on the red, blue or green boxes, to get a tick or remove it, will show or hide that debt type from the chart.

Hide the Overdrafts, by clicking off the tick in the red box, and leave just the blue columns of Personal Loans and the green line of credit cards and you will see one interesting thing. What seems to happen every December and January. In December credit card debt rockets, courtesy of Christmas shopping, whilst personal loans fall. Once the Christmas bills arrive in January, the credit card takes a back seat as lenders are deluged by consolidation loan applications. Well, that’s my theory.

Look at just the Personal Loans alone, by clicking off Credit Cards and Overdrafts, and you can see something else . . . They have been in a downtrend since the peak in month-on-month growth of £1,020,091,000 in May 2002.

You can zoom in by moving your cursor over the chart and clicking on the left button, say May 2002. Now drag the cursor to September 2008, the background will go a pale yellow. Let go of the left button on your mouse and the chart will zoom in to that period.


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Source: BBA
Most Recent Data: August 2008
Last Updated: 23 September 2008

Notes: Lending figures are those of members of the British Bankers’ Association (BBA). The BBA is the leading UK banking and financial services trade association and represents its members, from 60 countries, on domestic and international issues.

The Major British Banking Groups (MBBG) account for some two-thirds of all UK mortgage lending outstanding, provide over half of all consumer credit and, within that, some 70% of all card credit. They include the nine largest retail lenders in the UK: Abbey, Alliance & Leicester, Barclays, Bradford & Bingley, HBOS, HSBC Bank, LloydsTSB, Northern Rock and Royal Bank of Scotland.

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