At a time when we are barely coming off a recession with high unemployment, how are people getting their credit card balances down? "A number of people of course are just paying on them," said William Dunkelberg, an economics professor at Temple. "Another bunch are getting into trouble and are making deals with the card companies. That is, the card company knows they can't collect all the money, so it makes a deal and says ‘OK, if you pay half or if you pay whatever we'll just write off half and the rest of it you don't owe any more. And so you're no longer in debt to us.’ And so a lot of those write-downs are occurring. And that's one of the reasons why the total amount of debt owed is falling: the debt lenders are just writing off."