When former baseball player Lenny Dykstra filed for bankruptcy last week, we learned that he owed a whopping $4.2 million in credit card debt.

Mounting delinquencies on card debt are really bad news for the banks and some card companies behind the plastic. Yet Visa is mostly unscathed. That's because, although it owns a world-famous brand, Visa cards themselves are issued by banks. When consumers default, issuing banks take the hit, not Visa.

Visa collects fees from banks that slap its logo on cards. Visa also runs a network that completes transactions for merchants, and it's paid a small fee for each sale. So while banks suffer, Visa continues to make money, even in the recession.

And while consumers are using credit cards a lot less, they're not going back to cash or checks. Instead, they're turning to debit cards. Visa markets those, too, so it collects money whichever card gets used, says Patrick Dorsey, the director of equity research at Morningstar.

Though credit card purchase volume dropped almost 7% at Visa in the first quarter globally, debit card purchase volume increased 5.5%, according to Morningstar. That trade-off helped Visa report an impressive 13% revenue growth in the first quarter. With an additional boost from trimming costs, earnings were up 71%.

In contrast, competitor American Express is getting pounded. It has direct exposure to cardholder defaults and doesn't offer debit cards. Visa also beats MasterCard because while that rival also avoids credit risk, it lacks a strong a position in debit cards.

Yes, Visa will eventually get hurt if consumers continue to rein in spending. But Visa's network would be hard to duplicate. So in the long run, it's the big winner as long as people favor plastic over cash and checks. Goldman Sachs analyst Julio Quinteros predicts the stock will rise to $77 a share within a year, from about $60.

Continued: AstraZeneca's business is boomers