Growing consumer confidence is one explanation.
Chemical safety is a growing consumer concern.
So, the president has to focus on the task of getting the economy growing, consumers spending and banks lending again.
HSBC, the bank based in London, said that third-quarter revenue grew as consumer lending expanded in the United States and Britain, offsetting low interest rates.
Declan McSweeney, the CFO of Allied Irish Bank in 1998, is now finance chief of Home Credit, a fast-growing consumer-lending company in the Czech Republic.
Mr Watling points to some tentative signs that firms are starting to borrow and invest again as evidence that this is happening: in America, bank lending to firms is now growing faster than consumer lending for the first time since the late 1990s.
Consumer lending alone has been growing by an average of 40% in each of the past five years, enough to keep the foreign banks' assets and profits growing handsomely despite a slight loss of market share.By restricting the expansion of foreign banks, and so limiting the competition to provide banking services to Indian customers, the government has kept business costs unnecessarily high.
A study by the Bank of England reveals that a broader measure of consumer lending in November that includes bank overdrafts grew at its fastest rate since before the financial crisis, as consumers borrowed an additional £1.5bn.
It became a key source of profits, growing almost twice as fast as the company as a whole and expanding into every conceivable market: consumer lending, credit cards, equipment leasing, commercial real estate, auto loans, leveraged buyouts, even subprime mortgages.
Marketplace consumer lending (Prosper, Lending Club, SoFi), SMB lending (Funding Circle, Kabbage, OnDeck) and merchant installment plans (Klarna, Affirm, Financeit) have all generated traction by rapidly growing loan books and raising large funding rounds.
