Credit card interest

Oh, NFBSK the credit card companies. Call the WAMBULANCE, we aren't getting to loan shark everyone with impunity anymore, wah wah poor us now we have to make up for it by screwing everyone somewhere else.

They gutted CC regulation some years back which permitted them to all be based in states that basically allow loan sharking (I think it's South Dakota, not sure, but you can tell because all your CC's are out of there and it's the congressmen from those states voting against it) and suddenly they can't keep afloat unless they charge you a 40 dollar fee every time you turn around and raise interest rates to 29 percent. Before they did that, before that change in regulation, they didn't do all this crap they do now, and they seemed to do just fine. And people who deserved credit could get it just fine.

Now that they are finally being told they have to treat customers with the tiniest modicum of fairness that even Guido with the baseball bat would consider reasonable, they are all in a snit and "well fine, go ahead and we'll just figure out ways to screw even MORE of you so how DARE anyone regulate us!"

GAD! I don't know why that wonderful invisible hand of the free marketplace (sarcasm intended) isn't creating fairly run credit companies for us to all use alternatively, and let the loansharks go out of business, but it isn't. It absolutely isn't.

They made plenty of money before the deregulations that allowed them to screw us all over - I am not buying this big huge crybaby whinge from them that they will have no choice but to find other ways to rip us off in order to stay solvent. I've heard the arguments and I think they are just ways to rationalize unreasonable and unfair business practises and pure greed.

I've closed all my accounts except for the one with my locally owned credit union Mastercard (which is perhaps fairly close to that invisible hand marketplace option except for some reason people aren't using them - perhaps not everyone can get in them) which is not quite as bad. ~Well, I did keep a Chase account open because I've had it for so many years it might ding my credit rating to close it, but I'm not using it.

I don't know what the solution is, but letting them operate with zero restrictions which is what they'd like, is not it. This notion that businesses will self regulate as it's in their own best interest ~ when will we see that blow up in everyone's face enough times that companies will stop trying to use it for the jeers they get when they do? I guess anything's worth a try though, if the possibility of making more money by being unfair is at stake. I am so not buying the libertarian idea that businesses will figure out the best way if left alone to their own devices. Sooooo not buying it. As evidence: the entire economy for the past 10 years or so.

And I don't want to hear "nobody put a gun to (g)yer head and made you buy a couch you couldn't afford on yer credit card, personal responsibility, blahblahblah." Nobody put a gun to the credit card company, either, forcing them to give credit to people they know damn well shouldn't ever have had it in the first place, and THEY are the ones whose job it is to know better, not the general public. I put the majority of the blame on them.

~boy, that was a rant. I almost feel better now.