BofA Total Card Spending (w/e Oct 3rd) +3% Y/Y (prev. +5.6%); lower income spending growth continued to outpace higher income

Bank card spending trackers sit in the second tier of US consumption data: high frequency and directionally useful, but historically treated as a cross-check on the official retail sales and PCE prints rather than a market mover in their own right. A deceleration of this size within one week is common in these series, which are noisy around holiday timing, pay-cycle effects and weather; prior episodes of sharp week-on-week slowing have frequently been retraced in the following readings, which is why the trend across several prints matters more than any single one. The more durable signal in this dataset has been the split by income cohort: lower-income spending outpacing higher-income is a pattern that has previously accompanied both normalization from stimulus-era distortions and periods where real wage gains at the lower end ran ahead, and the two interpretations carry opposite implications for consumption resilience. The transmission channel runs through expectations for the consumption component of growth and, at the margin, through rate-path pricing via the data-dependence narrative, though single bank card prints rarely move front-end pricing on their own. The follow-ons are the next iterations of the same series for confirmation, the card data from peer banks for breadth, and the official retail sales and PCE releases against which this read will be tested.