In order to spur spending, Target Corporation (TGT) has long offered

discounts to consumers who signed up for its store-brand credit cards. And more often than not, those cards carried the Visa, Inc. (V) logo.

Well, not any more. This week, TGT announced it will no longer issue cards with the Visa logo and instead encourage shoppers to sign up for its own plastic "REDcard." It's a trend that could sap revenue away from credit card stocks V, Mastercard In (MA) and American Express (AXP).

It's not easy to make money from the small business market. But Vistaprint (VPRT) has found an efficient platform to do so. The company helps with the design of such things as business cards, brochures, calendars and even websites.

In Vistaprint's latest quarterly report, revenues grew 40% to $194.6 million and the company acquired 1.8 million new customers. In all, there are roughly eight million customers.

Discover Financial Services (DFS) issued its fiscal first quarter report Tuesday after the bell. According to an article at BusinessWeek.com, a net loss of 22 cents per share was recorded. Last year at this time, the card entity, which counts American Express (AXP) as a colleague, brought in 25 cents per share of positive income.

The quarter's red ink was driven by an addition to loan loss reserves. Without that aspect, Reuters says that Discover brought in a profit of 11 cents per share. Unfortunately, that won't help the company win the expectations game. The estimate at Earnings.com indicates a desired figure of 12 cents for the bottom line.

Visa (V), a credit card company that competes with American Express (AXP), Discover Financial Services (DFS), and MasterCard (MA), is looking good after the Q1 report, which was released to the market after the bell on Wednesday. GAAP net operating revenue went up 13%. Net income was $1.02 per Class A share, representing a 38% year-over-year increase. According to TheStreet.com, the expectation was for 91 cents.

I simply love this business model. We're a society that is addicted to using credit and debit cards, and Visa takes a little percentage of each transaction. So far, the model is working like a charm. Visa expects prosperous growth in the future, plus a whole lot of free cash flow.

Late Friday, Standard & Poor's (S&P) announced that it will add four new companies to the S&P 500 Index (SPX), including credit card company Visa (V). Visa will replace telecom equipment company Ciena (CIEN). S&P stated that all the companies moving to the index have market caps above $5 billion, which makes them more representative of the market-cap range.

This morning, analysts are reacting to the news, setting up Visa for a bit of a news-related Monday rally. RW Baird upgraded Visa to outperform from neutral and upped its target price from $88 to $100, noting that it expects growth to reaccelerate growth over the next couple quarter, "along with annual earnings-per-share growth of more than 20 percent over the next couple years." Baird also believes that improving retail sales will help Visa. In addition, William Blair upped its estimate on Visa in order to reflect "an improved volume outlook."

With American Express Co., (AXP), it's best to look down the field, i.e. think long-term, which is why I'm reiterating my Buy rating for the company, first recommended on April 27, 2009 at a price of $27.28. If you bought AXP in April, you're up about 51%.

As forecast, institutional investors (IIs) have looked right past AXP's likely double-digit revenue decline for 2009, to the probable sunnier skies in 2010. In the year ahead, charge-offs should continued to stabilize, amid slowing delinquencies.

US Senator Bernie Sanders, independent from Vermont, is known for his straightforward and unbiased positions.

His new legislative proposal is to break up big banks that are deemed "too big to fail." To quote Mr. Sanders: "if an institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. We should break them up so they are no longer in a position to bring down our entire economy."

I've said on many occasions that I prefer MasterCard (NYSE: MA) to Visa (NYSE: V). No, I don't mean the card products themselves. I mean the stocks. I believe Visa has better brand equity associated with it, and I think it possesses a little more depth and fundamental prowess. However, both of these companies operate on the same basic economic model: collect fees on transactions, and don't take on loan risk. So, both MasterCard and Visa do offer compelling long-term investment theses.

And, even though there were some negative outlooks on MasterCard's latest earnings report, which was released Tuesday, I have to say that I didn't find the situation too disturbing. Revenues increased only 2%. The top line was inhibited by currency effects, but it's not like we haven't heard that story before. More importantly, MasterCard posted adjusted income of $3.48 per share, representative of a 40% increase over the adjusted income recorded a year ago.

Visa (NYSE: V) is one of my favorite businesses on Wall Street. It should be an excellent long-term investment. People will always use branded credit cards, and Visa doesn't take a lot of risk. It simply collects a little of the spoils on each transaction. What a model!

According to TheStreet.com, Visa increased top-line sales by 10% in the fourth quarter, and expanded per-share profit by 28% to 74 cents, excluding certain items. Forecasts were for 72 cents per share.

This was the day that could have been. Earnings were coming out favorably, yet the data just couldn't support the stocks. There were also trader comments that BofA/Merrill had large sell orders or sell programs throughout the day. It looks like the DJIA even closed out under the 10,000 mark on an unofficial basis.

Here were today's unofficial closing bell levels:

Dow 9,974.75 -106.56 (-1.06%)
S&P 500 1,079.73 -13.18 (-1.21%)
Nasdaq 2,154.47 -10.82 (-0.50%)

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Consumer debt levels fell again in August for the seventh month in a row. Facing continued instability in the job market, people are paying down their debt, as a way to protect themselves. Savings are up, and borrowing is down – which could weaken the recovery. Consumer spending accounts for 70% of economic activity in the United States.

Total consumer debt outstanding dropped by $12 billion in August, according to the Federal Reserve, reflecting an annualized rate of 5.8%. Reality outpaced Wall Street's expectations, which were around $10 billion. In July, consumer debt outstanding fell $19 billion (9.1%), which was the largest in hard-dollar terms since 1943 and on a percentage basis since June 1975's 16.3%.

While consumer fear is playing a significant role, as a touchy housing market and dicey job situation leave little to lean on, the banks are also responsible for the change in direction. They aren't lending as easily, with stricter standards limiting the amount of credit available to consumers. You can't spend what you can't borrow.

Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS), a credit card company that competes with Visa (NYSE: V), MasterCard (NYSE: MA), and American Express (NYSE: AXP), released earnings for the third quarter on Thursday. The company put analysts to shame by posting a profit instead of a loss according to an article from Reuters.

The projection was for a loss of 12 cents per share. Discover actually made 52 cents per share of profit, once you exclude monies received from an antitrust settlement. Wow, that's what you call being way off the mark! The disparity surprised me, so I went to our very own earnings preview to see what we were reporting for an estimate. Sure enough, it stated the exact same expectation for a loss of 12 cents.

American Express Company (NYSE: AXP), a company that competes with Visa Inc. (NYSE: V), MasterCard Incorporated (NYSE: MA), and Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS), issued Q2 results earlier in the week. Earnings from continuing operations dropped very steeply to 9 cents per share. How steeply? Well, the per-share profit lost 84% of its value this time around. However, it might make you feel a little better to know that 18 cents can be added back, since that was the net worth of repurchase activity relating to preferred shares from the U.S. Treasury department. Therefore, American Express took in 27 cents per share from continuing activities. According to this Reuters piece, that number met expectations.

The Reuters article also points out that revenues fell by 18% and that net charge-offs increased. Not a great picture. Reading through the press release, an investor might come away with a feeling of dread. Management mentions the not-so-strong spending by its cardmembers and the fact that loan losses are at historic levels.

From this writer's observation, it seems that we have two US economies. One economy is doing just fine. The people in this group have money. They are living well, eating out frequently and buying pretty much what they want.

Then we have a second economy made up of the unemployed and persons living on the edge of disaster. Here we see a growing number of credit card and home equity delinquencies. These people are in a downward spiral. Having lost their jobs, they are using credit cards to survive. This leads to double trouble -- no money and default on credit card debt and home mortgage.

Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS), a credit-card company that competes with Visa (NYSE: V), MasterCard (NYSE: MA), and American Express (NYSE: AXP), reported earnings for the second quarter. According to this news summary, Discover beat expectations by posting a loss of $0.18 per share. The market thought that the loss would be as high as $0.29 per share.

If you read the actual press release, you'll see that Discover, on a reported basis, made $0.43 per share. However, we must remember that this profit included an antitrust settlement sourced to Visa and MasterCard. So, once you get rid of that money, you come up with a loss for the quarter.