RE: TOO MUCH19 Jun 2017 10:14
I don't think it's the Credit Card business. Giving 0% introductory offers will cost them, if anything even if customers use Balance Transfer offers to move away from Virgin Money when their offer is over, a percentage of those will stay and pay interest.
They'll have an idea of what that percentage is likely to be.... I think it's potentially a hit to their mortgages business. The housing market has been correcting a bit in London and the South East (I'm in the South East) with the drop in sales very noticable... and I read an article saying there had been a 19% drop in buy to let mortgages in the industry as a whole. Although Virgin Money's mortgages are made up of about 82% Residential they have 18% Buy to let.
I agree on the USA at least for now, the economic data was pretty much all bad last week. This could be an anomaly for some currently unknown reason, so need to see what future economic data releases are like.