Police Those Credit Cards
Lehrer counterpoint in BusinessWeek's Debate Room
The burdensome, patronizing, new credit card regulations proposed in the wildly misnamed “Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights” will hurt just about every type of U.S. consumer.
Indeed, the new restrictions that self-styled “consumer advocates” and their trial lawyer allies envision will result in immediate, sizeable interest rate and fee increases for the majority of Americans who pay their credit card bills on time. Quite simply, efforts to cap, reduce, and ban penalty fees and interest-rate hikes for bad customers will axiomatically lead profit-minded companies to seek returns elsewhere. Many will hike the annual fees and interest rates for everyone else. New ways to litigate likewise will create another lawyers’ payday while doing nothing to help ordinary Americans.
Those who live on limited incomes or fail to pay their bills on time—the supposed beneficiaries of the proposals—will also see themselves hurt. Many will be denied credit that bureaucrats decide they “can’t afford.” More will find they only qualify for the “secured credit cards”—which require a bank deposit against the credit line—that predominated in the dark days before deregulation helped banks figure out ways to extend credit to everyone.
In fact, the current credit card regulatory system serves consumers pretty well. Although hardly anybody reads through the dense fine-print agreements that come with credit cards, the mandatory easy-to-read disclosures of interest rates, penalties, and fees already give consumers a simple repository of information. The widespread availability of balance transfers—an option on nearly all non-merchant-branded consumer credit cards—helps consumers “repay outstanding balances in one fell swoop” and transfer money away from card issuers whose policies they don’t like.
Of course, the situation isn’t copacetic. Credit card agreements remain difficult to navigate, and many consumers find card issuers unfriendly. A drastic simplification of current regulations could eliminate a lot of the difficult fine print. Decreased regulation of credit card issuers, likewise, could let them find more creative ways to serve consumers’ needs. In short, we need less regulation, not more.
See the whole debate at BusinessWeek's Debate Room.
