(Summary: Credit card companies have been out-of-control with excessive fees, huge late penalties, a...

1. Personal Finance Topic #105 - Reckless Credit Card
Marketing
(Summary: Credit card companies have been out-of-control with excessive fees, huge late penalties,
and rampant marketing. This has resulted in significant impacts to some consumers' lives, some
of which are very tragic. This post exposes the cause and effect)
Frontline - Card Game
Last nightâEUR(TM)s Frontline was amazing. The top key people in banking industry and
government admitted on air that banks marketed credit cards to poor people with low credit scores
who can ill afford resulting fees and penalties that arose from using highly marketed credit cards
with low limits about 10 years ago. The practice was copied by all other major banks and
proliferated until this year. The worst part was the complete lack of regulatory enforcement due
to powerful banking lobbyists who were funding the election and re-election of candidates who
supported bank de-regulation. The government had conspired to let the banks increase through
usurious rates and fees and penalties to suck the blood out of those vulnerable consumers that can
protect themselves the least.
Watch the interview with Mr. Mehta at:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/creditcards/interviews/mehta.html
and click on "WATCH THE PROGRAM"
Maxed Out - the movie
This article appeared in the NY Bankruptcy Law web site in November 2007
What is the credit company's liability in cases where a life is taken as a result of pressure to pay
unsecured loan?
How Reckless is Credit Card Marketing to College Students?
Each year, thousands of bright young students walk on to college campuses, eager about a new life
experience and excited about prospects for the future. Yet the average freshman receives eight
credit-card offers in the first week at college. Maxed Out interviews two women whose children were
swept up by the deceit of easy credit. One evening, the daughter of one of the women called her
mother, distraught because she had just lost her part-time job and didn't know how she would be
able to make payments on her credit-card bills. Her mother reassured her not to worry about it and
that they would talk about it the next day. Shortly thereafter, her daughter was found dead in her
dorm room, her credit-card bills scattered across her bed. She had hanged herself. The son of the
other woman, Jane O'Donnell, was a National Merit Scholar at The University of Texas at Dallas. He
continued to receive credit-card offers in the mail, even after he had hanged himself not knowing
how to face his tremendous credit-card debt. The viewer realizes that these are real people-who had
killed themselves because they were in so much debt-when their mothers bring out photos of their
deceased children. (According to Jump$tart, 45 percent of college students are in credit-card debt,
with the average debt over $3,000.)