Word: credit-card
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...then some. Americans have confidently, even feverishly, borrowed money in record amounts to buy everything from compact disk players to country houses. The level of home mortgage debt has increased by 37% since December 1982, to $1.5 trillion. At the same time, the total of installment debt, which includes credit-card purchases, department-store credit and the like, has surged by 67%, to $548.7 billion...
Henry Hill's specialties included arson, auto theft, bookmaking, bribery, drug dealing, horse-race fixing, credit-card fraud, extortion and freight hijacking. He organized the much publicized 1978-79 Boston College basketball point-shaving scheme and helped plan the $6 million Lufthansa holdup at New York City's Kennedy International Airport...
Detectives quickly excluded the Notarnicola family as suspects. In nearby New Rochelle, Secret Service agents arresting three suspects for credit-card fraud inadvertently discovered a letter threatening further poisonings unless the three were paid $2 million. Investigators believed the note was a fraud, an attempt to cash in on a tragic situation, as happened after the Chicago killings, when Con Man James W. Lewis went to prison for ten years for sending a $1 million extortion note to Johnson & Johnson...
...Schultze and other board members argued that the personal debt load is not as heavy as it appears. Schultze explained that in calculating consumer debt, the Government includes credit-card purchases, which account for some 20% of the total. Yet many consumers pay their monthly bills immediately, before incurring any interest charges. Said Schultze: "That really shouldn't be counted as debt. They are using their cards for convenience...
Banks say that they must charge high rates because the level of fraud and defaults makes credit-card lending risky. They also contend that consumers give little thought to the interest costs. Nearly a third of all cardholders pay their balances within 30 days and thus avoid credit charges...