12-23-2007 Unpaid credit cards bedevil Americans

[Ozoned]

Originally posted by: LegendKiller


What are the defaults on a typical credit card? 6%-10%, with them being a lot more back-end loaded. What that means is that the timeshare company charges *LESS* interest that is *FIXED* while the CC company charges *MORE* interest that is *VARIABLE* and they have 1/2 the defaults.

To me that is blatant predatory activity, especially when you consider all of the other manipulations they use to screw consumers, such as changing due dates by a week at times.

Frankly, I hope that the companies get buried under a mountain of defaults and more than a few go out of business. I then hope there is such an uproar in the consumer space that Congress has no option but to heavily regulate them in the future.

You raise the interest rate on the people that do pay on time to compensate for the loss on those that default. Its like private welfare.

 

[Jhhnn]

Thanks, LK- you make a very cogent and persuasive argument.

It seems odd to me that there's very little recognition among posters here about just how badly the bursting of the tech bubble affected workers in that sector, or about the loss of manufacturing jobs and the effects of that.

Lots of people get into a groove that they think will never end- making really solid money in what seems to be a stable field, and then, blam! They get blindsided, and their formerly in-demand skills are now a dime a dozen. Even those who are prudent and keep strong reserves can end up way behind if un- or under- employed for any length of time at all. So they lean on their credit cards to carry them thru, except that the far shore is further than they'd figured, and the landscape not as green as what they'd become accustomed to...

Once people fall behind, the CC companies really put the wood to 'em, as mentioned- it's as if having their customers go belly up was a good thing... and the so-called bankruptcy "reform" of 2005 just made lenders bolder in the extension of credit and of punitive action against delinquents...

While, yeh, if the borrowers can be said to be at fault for their own misfortunes, obviously true to some degree, that's even more so for lenders, who really, really should know better... and deserve whatever losses they may incur.

 

[Engineer]

Credit card debt up over 11% year over year in November with Consumer NON-MORTAGE credit now at 2.5 TRILLION dollars!!!

:shocked:

Originally posted by: Jhhnn
It seems odd to me that there's very little recognition among posters here about just how badly the bursting of the tech bubble affected workers in that sector, or about the loss of manufacturing jobs and the effects of that.

You can say that again. Working in manufacturing (even in the tooling division as I do), ouch!!!

 

[AnitaPeterson]

Originally posted by: WhipperSnapper

Lessee...we sent manufacturing jobs overseas along with many knowledge-based college-education-requiring jobs and/or filled them with foreign work visas. In the meantime, the housing market has unraveled. Now Americans are having problems paying their credit card bills? Gotta be hard to do that when the nation's middle class jobs have been shipped overseas or filled by imported labor or been converted to lower-wage jobs. Looks like the first chickens are just starting to come home to roost..

BINGO!

Don't forget rampant corporatism/consumerism ("planned obsolescence" is one of the most obscene and traitorous notions ever put into practice), and economical imbalance caused by the excessive growth of the services sector.