Bernanke And The Perpetuating Credit Card Swindle

[Joanne98]

Banks, and whomever else we blissfully accepted a credit card from, have been charging us, all of us, grossly usurious fees. Even those diligent observers faithfully sending off payments before they were due, have long been abused by capricious credit card issuers. When the Head of The Fed, Ben Bernanke, gets involved because Congress has been asleep, you know the pressure of discontent from tens of millions of Americans is building beyond a sustainable level of annoyance. Ben Bernanke's comment that the rules, "will establish a new baseline for fairness," is so fraught with meaning one doesn't know where to begin its appreciation, ... well almost. 
This is what he might be saying:


----------------------

"We have been exhorting so much out of your pockets for so long through slight of hand, guilt, ... no, make that fear, that we are led to enact a few rules that will do nothing for you. If we present these new rules with enough jaw-dropping appearance of boldness and empathy for your well-being, you will remain oblivious to the vulgarity with which you have been and will continue to be fouled.

"Don't get yourselves in a knot over this one-half-of-one-percent-rate thing on the sub-slime, I mean sub-prime interest rate the Fed charges its friends, and quit wondering why you can't get in on that good stuff. It doesn't concern you, and has nothing to do with you. Never has, never will. That rate has no correlation to the 14% to 36% interest you pay on your credit cards. Such rates are because you are all really terrible at keeping your books in order, and making all your debt payments on time. If you knew what you were doing, you'd never agree to pay such insane rates. You are so oblivious, you could be getting better rates on your street corner. Idiots. Oh, sorry. I didn't mean that, although, why are there almost three quarters of a trillion credits cards holding a trillion dollars in debt when there are only 300 million men, women and children in this wonderful country of ours? And, NO, I will not go into an explanation of why our friends, the banks, get almost no interest charged on money we lend them, while their credit stinks, and you have to bail them out. It is much too Byzantine a system to be explained. Even my bosses have no clue.

"Ladies and gentlemen the rules regulating credit are complex, though a little feudal. You've understood all along that we, umm, I mean the banks and credit card issuers, could set interest rates and fees at whatever levels they wished. Why so much surprise? We are nevertheless pleased to announce that we will reduce re-pricing, a little, well, we won't reduce it but we want you to be notified when it will happen. Will we check if lenders tell you ahead of time? No.

Continued>>>>
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Bernanke-And-The-Perpetuat-by-James-Raider-081220-727.html

What would they do if we declared 2009 a year of Jubilee?????

[Mike 03]

1. Bizarre post. Anyone would have given the same answer to that question as Bernanke did.

The Fed has jack shit to do with the credit card companies.

Their practices are usurious to say the least, but to drag Bernanke into this--and his hands are full as it is--is horeshit of greatest order. Talk to the SEC.

Even if it were true, if one wanted to blame the Federal Reserve, the obvious culprit would be Greenspan, for chrissakes. Duh.

[Joanne98]

4. You haven't heard? The Fed is reigning in the CC's. Or that's what they saying.

New credit card rules can’t take effect fast enough

Why wait? Federal regulators adopted last week a pro-consumer overhaul of credit card regulations, the most significant change to the rules in decades.

But the Federal Reserve, Office of Thrift Supervision and National Credit Union Administration said the nation’s credit-card issuers won’t have to live by the new rules until July 1, 2010.

But why wait until then?

In acting, the regulators labeled as unfair or deceptive various industrywide practices. That included raising rates on outstanding balances, known as “repricing” interest rates. Under the new rules, that’s banned except in limited circumstances.

The banking regulators also require that consumers be given a “reasonable amount of time” to make credit card payments. And they passed new rules about how credit card companies should apply payments that are more than the minimum amount requested. As it stands now, when a consumer had a card with multiple credit lines and different interest rates on each, banks apply “overpayments” to the balance with the lowest interest rate. In doing that, card issuers let the most expensive loans on the card linger the longest so the consumer winds up paying more in interest charges over time. The regulators passed prohibitions on reducing the balance on the cheapest loan first.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/buggs/6174820.html

[anigbrowl]

2. I'll rec this if it means an end to copypasta threads.

[Joanne98]

3. What's that? I had a hard time figuring out where to break that up..

If you click on the link it's just one long paragraph!