Bank of America (w/e Aug 29) Total Card Spending +3.7% Y/Y (prev. +5% in July); add that, on balance, the robust spending growth in August is consistent with the view that the slump in July was a blip

Bank of America (w/e Aug 29) Total Card Spending +3.7% Y/Y (prev. +5% in July); add that, on balance, the robust spending growth in August is consistent with the view that the slump in July was a blip.

Proprietary card-spending series from the large banks sit in the second tier of US consumption data: useful as a high-frequency cross-check on the official retail sales and PCE prints, but with their own quirks around sample composition, holiday timing, and pay-period effects that have historically generated month-to-month noise. The pattern flagged here, a soft month followed by re-acceleration, is the classic sequence in this series; single-month slumps in bank card data have more often than not proven to be calendar artifacts rather than the start of a consumption rollover, which is why the 'blip' framing matters. The distinction worth drawing is between nominal card growth and real, broadly based spending: these figures embed prices and skew toward the card-using, higher-income cohort that has carried aggregate consumption, so strength here says less about the lower-income stress visible in delinquency data. The usual transmission runs through consumption expectations feeding into the next retail sales and PCE prints and, at the margin, the growth inputs to the rates path rather than through any direct read on the bank itself. What is worth watching is whether the official data confirm the bounce and whether peer bank card series show the same July dip and August recovery, since a shared pattern points to a calendar quirk and a divergence points to something real.