Another sign of a credit problems? American Express adds $320 million to provisions for bad credit card debt in first quarter

Bad signs for the economy in American Express earnings report

Sometimes a single earnings report is just that–a report from a single company that reflects what’s going on in that company’s business and that tells us relatively little about the economy as a whole. And then there are earnings reports that give us a snapshot of the larger economy from the point of view of a single company. In that case, savvy investors should be looking to extrapolate from that snapshot. Today, October 21, American Express (AXP) delivered this second kind of earnings report.