Chasing Card Companies

The New York Times Wall Street Journal did a nice story a few days ago on the compliance issues swirling around the Credit CARD Act. It details the kinds of new fees that consumers are seeing and explores the legality of these practices. The article provides some ideas of things that the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection might explore in its early days. Several of these practices seem legal under the new law but perhaps would fare less well under an unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices analysis. If nothing else, the Bureau would presumably be a one-stop repository for collecting and tracking the changing practices of card companies, a task now that the federal government largely delegates to news reporters!

Comments

[Glenn]

The link goes to a great article, but it's in the Wall Street Journal, not NYT. Nit is picked. Thank you for this excellent blog!

[Katie Porter]

Apologies to both of my favorite newspapers for the mistake. I had just read this:
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/new-restrictions-for-debt-settlement-firms/

It's excellent piece in the New York Times on debt settlement companies that I'll blog about soon and I got them mixed up. Thanks Glenn for catching my mistake!

[FactChecker]

Several Questions remain, who will track it, what will be tracked, how much will be tracked, and whether tracking is necessary.

It may be simple, but its a bit murky as to what this organization will do, sure it may have broad powers, will it use them, what limits will be there, what will be tracked, is it limited to fees and interest charges or more comprehensive , will the government have test hires who actually use cards and experiment, now that will be interesting.