Word: cards
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...have come for revenge. For years, I've hyperventilated at restaurant "tasting menu" checks, forfeited 1,000% markups for bottle service at clubs, neared my credit-card limit for hotel suites, paid usury to strip-club ATMs and pushed far too many chips to the dealer. On this trip, I will get a hotel room for less than the upkeep on the room, eat a meal for near what it costs to serve it and - at least according to a sign in the Cheetahs dressing room berating the strippers for undercharging - get some kind of deal in the VIP room...
...Together, we infiltrated Dudley House—a complicated process that involved avoiding eye contact with Harvard University Dining Services staff as I paused in front of the unmanned card swiper, and pretended to produce...
...45pm: We make our way upstairs to Arrivals and catch a metered cab that has just dropped off a passenger. After letting us out at our hotel, the driver advises, "Be careful with taxis" and hands us the business card of the company he is affiliated with...
...return to normal is driven by a return to reasonable lending: people aren't buying more than they can afford to because banks won't let them. When the Robertses first met with mortgage planner Iva Deobald last year, she told them to go away, pay down their credit-card and student-loan debt and then come back with a better set of financials. Deobald says, "I'm back to what I used...
...caps - that is, on the absence of strict usury laws. Why? Almost every state had usury laws in the 1920s, and they were circumvented one by one. Prohibitions against excessive interest started to disappear [South Dakota, for instance, loosened its laws in 1980], and once they did, the credit-card companies recognized a wonderful opportunity. They could charge as much as the market would bear, claiming that they had to charge more for bad credit risks. You can argue that's the democratization of credit, but it's in the interest of credit-card companies to keep people under...