st year. The earnings were a penny better than the forecast of analysts surveyed by FactSet. Revenue fell to $20.3 billion from $21.5 billion, largely due to lower income from mortgage fees. Wells Fargo said more of its customers were paying their debts on time as the economy improves. Other major banks that have released results over the past week, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp., reported similar trends. The amount of soured loans that Wells wrote off declined by $629 million from the previous quarter to $3.2 billion. Wells released $1 billion from its reserves for loan losses in the quarter as defaults declined, giving a boost to its bottom line. A sharp rise in mortgage rates hurt Wells' home loan business. Rates for 30-year mortgages jumped to 4.84 percent in March from 4.35 percent in September. New mortgage loans at Wells fell to $84 billion from $128 billion the previous quarter. Applications for home mort In 2009, a devastating year for the global economy, U.S. multinational companies' worldwide employment shrunk by 4.1 percent to 31.3 million workers. But the cuts were much sharper at home than abroad. Domestic employment by the same companies shrunk by 5.3 percent, leaving 21.1 million with jobs, while their overseas counterparts lost 1.5 percent of their workforce, with 10.3 million still employed. "Emerging markets [are] growing at two-and-a-half times the speed of industrialized countries, which has made it imperative for companies to look abroad for opportunities," said Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. For large American multinationals, the geopraphical calculus is simple: Follow the money. "[The report] is not surprising at all. It is harder and harder for business credit cards? In order to truly answer this question, we must take a closer look at the law itself. As it turns out, Congress made a distinction between the two card segments, structuring the CARD Act so that it applies to "open-ended consumer agreements" and directing the Federal Reserve Board of Governors to study the law's future applicability to the business credit card market. In case you're wondering, an open-ended consumer agreement is legally defined as credit extended to a natural person for the purpose of making personal, family or household-related transactions. Thus, it's pretty clear that the protections enumerated in the CARD Act do not apply to business credit cards, right? Wrong. According to the Card Hub study, every major business credit card issuer holds the individual who opens such a card liable for use in addition to the small business he represents. Six of the 10 largest issuers in the U.S. also report usage information to the individual cardholder's credit reports (Wells Fargo, HSBC, and U.S. Bank refused to be transparent about their practices, so this number might actually be even higher). And any prospective business credit card user must provide personal financial information on his application. It's therefore obvious that credit is extended to a natural person, and since a small business owner uses his credit card to provide for his family and earn a living, it would seem that so-called business credit cards qualify as open-ended consumer agreements under the language of the law and should therefore be extended protection under the CARD Act. Either that or personal credit cards should not receive these protections when used for business spending. Ultimately, the answer to the original question about the nature of the difference between business and consumer credit cards therefore seems to be branding. There is no fundamental difference between the two. Eligibility fo