House of Cards
You thought the housing crisis was bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
By: 07/30/2008
A student is counting out twenties as his first deposit.
BANK REP: “I just need your signature. Right here, please.”
ANOTHER BANK REP: “And it’s free while they’re a student.”
What will happen when it’s time to pay it back includes nonstop calls to them and their parents. Credit card collection agencies know how to harass, threaten and then sweet-talk cardholders who are late. They even have a term for people squeezed by debt: “sweatbox.” They also know that the longer the debt goes unpaid, the larger the potential profit for companies, as interest builds up at rates of up to 30 percent. Credit card promoters call people who only pay minimums “revolvers.” Those of us who pay our bills in full? “Deadbeats.”
Recently the companies unilaterally hiked late fees and penalties that compound the debt. A few missing payments can earn you an interest rate hike to 29 to 30 percent. If you are late with a payment on some other debt not related to your credit card, you can readily find your interest fee doubled on your credit card. Some companies make more on fees and penalties than on interest payments. The companies racked up more than $17 billion in 2006, the last year for which records are available.
Like many of the homeowners who accepted subprime mortgages, and like you with your credit cards, youths and adults alike signed dense agreements that are largely unreadable. The credit card banks constantly update these with those small-print notices, drafted by risk-minimizing lawyers, with which you get assaulted in the mail. Of course, it’s unlikely you bother to read these. In part of the unread text, the companies give themselves the right to unilaterally change the deal even after it is signed. Other small print ensures that consumers cannot sue them over differences. All grievances have to be arbitrated in a process the companies created and control.
Even the Federal Reserve Bank condemns some of these practices, noting: “Although profitability for the large credit card banks has risen and fallen over the years, credit card earnings have been consistently higher than returns on all commercial bank activities.”
Track the subprime and credit card mess back, and you will find its origins in free market policies since Reagan, which deregulated banking and much of the oversight that managed for years to keep the greed-meisters on Wall Street in check. The failure of media-lionized Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve Bank to pay attention to predatory lenders and sub-prime schemers allowed them to prosper.
Add to these failures a complicit Congress, with Democrats and Republicans alike dependent on donations from the three leaders of the FIRE economy. To assure their freedom to run their businesses their own damn way, the banks in the 1990s persuaded Congress to deregulate the practices of financial service companies. Pro-business court decisions have allowed them to base their operations in low-tax states like South Dakota and Delaware and to end consumer protections against usury.
This decade, Bush’s tax cuts and his bankruptcy “reform” bill strengthening the power of credit card companies were passed with bipartisan support, including that of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. Add major media amnesia to this list and you get a trifecta of failure. The New York Times admitted that advocates warned them that a rise in predatory lending was destroying poor communities in 2001, but they sat on the story for nearly six years.
Neither the politicians nor the media told us that every major brand name banking firm and investment house had its fingers in the juicy pie of pedaling mortgage-backed securities worldwide without disclosing that many of these mortgages were deliberately offloaded on people whom they knew could not afford to pay them. As with the credit card industry, these mortgage borrowers were cleverly given “teaser rates” that would soon reset upwards. The banks then resold the mortgages as “asset-backed paper” even though the assets’ value was so questionable.
Meanwhile, media outlets took in hundreds of millions in ad revenues from deceptive lenders and credit card banks encouraging Americans to shop and charge till we drop. The Super Bowl broadcast ran all those cool but misleading ads by credit card companies and mortgage hustlers. It was, um, “priceless.”
Notes scholar Lionel Tiger: “Those who have been operating the managerial levers of the financial system have failed embarrassingly and massively to comprehend the processes for which they are responsible. They have loaned money avidly and recklessly to people who couldn’t pay it back.
“They fudged data to get loans approved and recalculated. Then they sausaged fragile figments of money reality into new ‘products’ which could be sold around the world to investors eager to enjoy the surprising returns which often accompany theft, managerial incompetence and fraud. When it comes to responsibility for all this, there appears to be no one here but us spring chickens.” SFR
See the quick breakdown on How Bad Is It?
