Fitch Ratings reported that stress in the U.S. energy sector should not materially impact the credit profiles of large consumer lenders with national footprints. Recent evidence of weakening consumer credit performance in energy producing regions more likely represents a reversion to mean after years of high growth instead of a substantive downturn.

Absent a contagion effect to other sectors, the impact of higher unemployment in regions with outsized exposure to the energy sector is unlikely to be of significant scale to impact the benign environment for consumer credit on a national level.