Credit Card Shoe Dropping?

Michelle Lederer at the wonderful Footnoted.org site points to this very good associated press article on rising deliquencies in credit card debt. Michelle adds this example of her own:

But why stop at credit cards, since just like sub-prime mortgages, it’s just another product that’s been sliced and diced? A quick skim of recent 10-Ds turns up this fascinating exhibit filed last week by BMW Vehicle Lease Trust 2007-1. Because this is a relatively new trust, there’s not enough history to go back a year. But going back one month shows a small, but potentially dangerous trend: at the end of October, there was only 1 loan in this trust that was 90 days or more late. But by the end of November, that had risen to 30. Granted, it’s a small number, but it’s still a 30-fold increase from one month to the next. And it’s presumably in a segment of the economy that’s about as far removed from sub-prime mortgages as you can get.

You know, if you read enough about subprime, cdo's, siv's, underfunded bond insurers, multi-billion dollar writedowns, bank runs in the UK etc. etc, you might begin to think there is a problem.