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Comment by listenallyall | Hacker News Reader

Why did you skip over the meat of the article in the second paragraph (and a graph) to complain about something in the 14th?

Credit card lenders wrote off $46bn in seriously delinquent loan balances in the first nine months of 2024, up 50 per cent from the same period in the year prior and the highest level in 14 years, according to industry data collated by BankRegData.

> The citation is clearly to another internet source

How is "data from Moody's" (likely internal, unreleased, or subscriber-only) clearly an internet source?

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Do you think the reporter at FT accessed this information on a paper report which was mailed to them?

If not, then it is on the internet somewhere. Whether it is on the “public” or “free” internet is different. If it is not freely available, then they could still give a real citation, so someone else with access to Moody’s private data could find it.

Email is not "an internet source", and neither is my corporate sharepoint site.

“based on communications with Moody’s analysts”

“based on internal data from Moody’s”

“data from Moody’s” with no qualifier indicates the reader should be able to reasonably find the information themselves (which they can’t in this case)

The general public expects to be able to find all of Moody's analysis and data? No. The "from Moody's" is the part that indicates this data is likely proprietary and inaccessible, as opposed to a government or university source like the Fed, or U.Mich consumer surveys.

This is a really nitpicky thread when in my top comment I allowed for the possibility of private sources:

> If it truly cannot be linked because it is private, more context is still needed to understand what this data means.

Guess you skipped over the context provided in the preceding 13 paragraphs:

a sign that lower-income consumers’ financial health is waning

a closely watched measure of significant loan distress

but the bottom third of US consumers are tapped out

consumers’ personal finances are becoming increasingly stretched

Consumer spending power has been diminished

Americans who cannot pay off their credit card bills in full paying $170bn in interest

as a result, more of those borrowers are struggling to pay back their credit card debt

It’s likely a mix of private service access, emailed reports, calls and chats if the reporter typically covers this beat.

Journalists (good ones) have sources. Perhaps he was provided the delinquency information via a phone call, or text, or at an invite-only presentation. It might be something Moody's will release publicly tomorrow, or next week/month, but this reporter got an early preview. There's a million reasons it wouldn't necessarily be on the internet right now.

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