BofA (w/e 26th Sept) Total Card Spending +5.6% Y/Y (prev. +6.9%); notes that after a brief reversal last week, lower-income spending growth again outpaced higher income

Bank card-spending series of this kind sit in the second tier of consumption data: timely and high-frequency, but with a narrower and shifting sample than the official retail and personal spending prints, so they tend to be read as corroboration rather than as a driver. A deceleration of the headline year-on-year rate of the size shown here has, in past episodes, mattered mainly when it confirmed a direction already visible in the official data; standalone wobbles have tended to fade, particularly where week-to-week reversals are flagged in the release itself. The more durable signal in this series has historically been the distributional split: when lower-income cohorts lead or lag aggregate spending, it feeds the narrative on the health of the lower-end consumer that drives positioning in discretionary and staples names and shapes how desks read the next retail sales and PCE prints. Lower-income growth re-accelerating above higher-income growth has on previous occasions been interpreted both ways, either as resilience from a firm labour market or as nominal spending flattered by essentials and credit reliance, and which read prevails has depended on the accompanying labour data. Worth noting is whether the card data and the official consumption prints converge over the following weeks, and whether the issuer commentary around it echoes the same distributional point. As a single proprietary weekly series, the signal is directional and supplementary.