NYT: "The Plastic Trap"

The New York Times carries this feature-length article on

the new era of consumer credit, in which thousands of Americans are paying millions of dollars each month in fees that they did not expect and that strike them as unreasonable. Invoking clauses tucked into the fine print of their contract agreements, lenders are doubling or tripling interest rates with little warning or explanation.

The thieves' banks' tactics are upsetting, and Americans' debt loads are disturbing.

I've used the word "evil" before to describe some of the worse scam artists credit card companies out there, and that's not a word that I toss around lightly as a pastor. Certainly individuals carry a major share of the responsibility for their predicament, but there's something especially heinous about the practice of lending to people precisely because they aren't creditworthy. Banks count on being able to snag people at arbitrarily high interest rates, with obscene late and over-limit fees, regular increases in the credit line, and ridiculously low minimum payments. Their accountants have done the math, and the few people who shouldn't have credit and prove it by declaring bankruptcy are far outweighed in the balance sheet by the countless poor saps who will be paying 24% interest at $30 a month, with the occasional $45 service charge, for the rest of their natural lives.

The people behind these schemes are subhuman - the capitalist system at its "finest"... I sometimes wonder whether Tyler Durden didn't have the right idea after all. Too bad for multiply redundant backups...