3
Credit card reforms coming, eventually
A window sticker advertising Visa and MasterCard credit cards in San Francisco
To view this content, Javascript must be enabled and Adobe Flash Player must be installed.
TEXT OF STORY
Scott Jagow: The Federal Reserve is expected to approve credit card reforms today.
They'll be good changes for customers. Unfortunately, you'll have to wait a while to see them. Marketplace's Janet Babin reports from North Carolina Public Radio.
Janet Babin: The changes will put an end to rates that just go up, whenever -- and they'll prohibit one credit card company from changing your terms just because you might have paid late on another card. But the reforms aren't supposed to go into effect until 2010.
Burt Flickinger with Strategic Resource Group says until then, credit card companies will actually charge consumers more in fees and fines, while they still can:
Burt Flickinger: Two million consumers will probably go down during that time, where the economy and the country can't afford to have any more consumers going down because of higher interest rate levels on credit card debt.
The American Bankers Association says the reforms will be a challenge to the credit card business that's already struggling with record customer defaults.
I'm Janet Babin for Marketplace.
We always have to be grateful to Mr Clinton for removing credit cards from the bankrupcy! Now you can be up to your ears and you can not include you CC in a bankrupcy, especially when people go on the streets due to his removal of controls of financial institutions. Thanks bill!
The reforms need to be in place quickly to help end the recession. Until that happens consumers have less to spend on goods because their available income goes to paying high interest and fees instead of consumer spending. Consumers are spending more on paying down their cards and less on consumer goods to get out from under the high interest rates. Because of the high interest and fees consumers are limiting their spending to what they can pay cash.
And it is just absurd that despite sending a written notification to cancel my Bank of America card, they keep sending me balance transfer checks and raising my credit limit. They send me a change of terms notice every month. The change of terms notice has no identification or even a date of the change, so that when I send the letter of rejection of the change of terms, there is now way to reference which change of terms notification that I am referring to.
