Word: crediteers
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...problem with the credit-card industry isn't just credit-card companies - it's you too. This week the Senate takes up a bill that would seriously clamp down on some of the industry's most unsavory practices, a piece of legislation that President Obama has said he wants on his desk by the end of the month. The bill, which builds on rules issued by the Federal Reserve Board and other agencies at the end of last year, would do away with interest-rate hikes on existing balances, prohibit issuers from putting customer payments toward lower-rate balances first...
...Credit-card companies, though, may not be the only ones we need to be protected from. Every penny of Americans' nearly $1 trillion in revolving debt started with someone - some individual person - whipping out a piece of plastic and making a decision to use it. We could consider that free will and just call it a day, but there's plenty of reason to believe the story isn't so simple. There are piles of evidence that people are bad decision makers when it comes to how they use credit cards. Even when presented with full and fair information, they...
...Consider the teaser rate. More than a third of consumers pick one credit card over another based on which issuer has the lowest introductory interest rate. And yet people often do so in a way that leaves them with higher finance charges over time. In one study, University of Maryland economists Haiyan Shui and Lawrence Ausubel watched people pick a card with a teaser rate of 4.9% for six months over a card with a teaser rate of 7.9% for 12 months. That would make sense if the people then paid off their balances within six months. But many didn...
...systematic psychological breakdown - as a species we're just really bad at understanding costs that come later on. Instead, we assign a disproportionate amount of importance to what's immediate and tangible. We lock eyes with that initial low rate and can't look away. (And, yes, credit-card companies get that...
...same 12 nations that have joined the E.U. since 2004, most from Eastern Europe. Now not only are those post-Cold War newcomers - who used huge inflows of European development aid to build up U.S.-style economies - most in need of more emergency funding to prop up their credit-dependent markets, but they are also viewed as migrant threats to other E.U. nations already facing escalating unemployment. Not surprisingly, such factors have fueled a rise in the sentiment among old E.U. nations that recent eastward enlargement was a mistake...