The Card Game II

A conversation about deceptive credit card practices with Oriana Zill de Granados, producer and writer of the Frontline documentary, "The Card Game," and Gail Hillebrand, Senior Attorney at Consumers Union, and director of http://defendyourdollars.org/

If you've recently received something that looks like junk mail from a bank, you might want to read it. Credit card companies are jacking up interest rates by 20 to 30 percent, but because there's no law that mandates how these notifications are sent out, the banks wouldn't mind if you just threw away the notice and continued paying the minimum balance.

After 10 years of inaction, Democrats recently passed the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act, but the new reforms don't go into effect until February. The banks are doing whatever they can to cash in until then.

Profits from credit card penalty fees are expected to top $20.9 billion this year alone.

Watch "The Card Game" - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/creditcards/

Find out how much Wall St. has given to politicians at the Center for Responsive Politics: http://www.opensecrets.org/index.php

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• credit cards
• banks
• frontline
• the card game
• consumers union
• debit
• debt
• bankruptcy
• deceptive practices
• interest rates

[kipptumor]

@MyInformer Exactly! Don't use credit cards or debit cards. Carry very limited sensible amounts of cash with you. I pay all my utilities from the grocery store here because they offer it. I buy stuff with actual money, which insures that that is the absolute end of paying for whatever it is at the time. If you can't affords it today, how are you going to be able to afford four-times that amount in the future?