In his New York Times article today, Joe Nocera quotes from an article titled "Red Ink Rising" by Dean Starkman published in this month's Columbia Journalism Review. Starkman's primary point is how the business and financial press focused only on "traditional earnings and marketing stories" while what he calls a "radical shift" was underway as the credit card industry "shifted from a lending and underwriting paradigm to a sales paradigm; penalties, fees, and default interest at rates that were illegal a generation ago are no longer regrettable outcomes to be avoided but central to the business model."

In an article titled 'Credit Cards Are Frothy, Not Bubbly', Joe Nocera writes for the New York Times about the current state of the credit card industry and why it's likely that the 'credit card companies will actually do O.K. while the rest of us suffer.'

[Editor's note: Nocera is the author of 'A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class' published in 1995 that tells, among other things, the early history of the credit card industry. It's one of our recommended books for payments professionals.]