The Credit Card Question: A Game of Chicken between the Fed and the Credit Card Companies

I'm too exhausted to fight over this issue, but what Bernanke was saying last week is that there is a game of chicken going on between the credit card companies, the Federal Reserve, the Legislative body of the United States, and the angry customer.

Bernanke made some points, and I'm going to just relay them:

1. The credit card providers have the upper hand with respect to "ultimatums", because if the deadline is moved up for these safeguards, they have the right to just say "We don't want to provide your credit anymore, your credit card is invalid, and your balance is due within thirty days." End of story.

That was what Bernanke said his great fear was, and why he had tortured over whether to issue ultimatums to the credit card companies or not.

I have the feeling I'm forgetting something important that needs to be added, but this point seems important to me: There are apparently a lot of people who run high balances on their credit cards who don't realize how much their credit histories could be nebulized were their credit card companies to be blocked into a corner where they had no choice other than to cut many of their customers off their roles completely.

That is what Ben Bernanke meant about trying to avoid a catastrophe with respect to holding a gun to the heads of the credit card issuers.

Please don't kick the shit out of me for trying to explain this. I hope I am being clear and that what I am trying to say makes sense. The bottom line, as I understand it, is if that you are running a high balance, and these new rules are put into place now instead of a year from now, your balance will be due, and your credit lines will but demolished and simply unavailable. You will no longer have access to credit of any kind.

After all, he (and the rest of the Paulson/Summers/Geithner Banker Bailout crew) did order that you and I give roughly one year's wages to bankers so that they could keep their enormous compensation packages.

Their schemes have backed too many people into a corner, the CC companies will never recoup after forciing so many customers into a position in which they cannot pay no matter how hard they try. They have fucked themselves. No pity.

It'll just be an excuse to increase funding of the Paulson/Summers/Geithner Banker Bailout plan - using more of you tax money.

And we won't do a damn thing about it, because we're sheep.

what they can and can not do. Obama's administration needs to rule the entire banking and financial system with an iron fist and stop letting these proven criminals call the shots in THEIR free market environment. Free market capitalism does not work and only supports massive abuses by our financial institutions. Unfortunately Obama doesn't have the guts to crackdown on these crooks.