by Calculated Risk on 1/22/2009 08:27:00 PM

From the Capital One conference call, on Closed End Unsecured Loans (hat tip Brian):

Analyst: When you look at the closed in loans that are clearly under performing at this stage, what is it about either the underwriting or the characteristics of that group of loans which makes that different than say a normal revolving credit card or what would you suppose is maybe leading to the worse than expected performance at this point?

COF CEO: There are several factors involving the closed in loans. From a credit point of view, closed end loans tend to attract, just sort of by the nature of who the customer base that pursues an installment loan, tends to attract a customer base that is a little more credit intense if you will relative to the broad swath of our credit card base because a credit card of course is also a transactional product as well as a borrowing product. These closed in loans in fact were to pretty darn strikingly high FICO customers, basically super prime customers by profile, but they certainly have a degraded a lot more quickly than the overall super prime sort of equivalent super prime credit card customer. You know, they tend to be -- a couple of things about the boom and bust market that we have seen both they tend to perform -- they are performing worse in the boom and bust market we can see that than the credit cards, and they have a higher concentration in boom and bust markets as well. ...
emphasis added

Those darn strikingly high FICO super prime borrowers!