NumByte 5: Credit Cards

When you're digging yourself into a hole, the best initial advice would be to stop digging. For US consumers, that often means cutting up the credit cards -- and they did. No wonder Visa and Mastercard are so interested in getting smartphone virtual wallets apps up and running (see the VCF Retail Bulletin, June 7, 2011, for 'Smartphones As Virtual Wallets'). According to Moody's Analytics, the number of bank and retail credit cards dropped from 600 million to 460 million.