I'm guessing they think they are too big to fail and Odumbnuts will bail them out with "free" money.
I live within my means and pay my bills on time. I get credit card offers in the mail all the time.
Amex sends me pretty much one piece of junk mail every day. I trash every bit of it.
I closed the corporate AmEx account a while back when this all first started. I just had a friend yesterday try to pay a $2000 flight bill with his corporate AmEx but had it declined even though he had been spending ten times that each month and paying it every month without fail and had only used about $10k so far this month. He had another card to use but the entire flight trip might have had issues if that had happened during the trip.
We’re having a heck of a time where I work. We use AmEx business cards and AmEx is not only changing rules and limits day to day, they’re also not operating very efficiently. Payments made aren’t showing up in a timely manner, etc. What do you think is up with that?
My four credit card bills ( Discover, MC, 2 Visa) all arrived within the last week ). I always pay them off in full every month. Have never had a finance charge. Oddly, this month ALL four sent me notices that they were INCREASING my credit line..Go figure..
Various Credit Card Companies are really the unsuspected causes of GLOBAL WARMING. I and millions of others daily received unasked for envelopes, full of paper offering FABULOUS deals on new credit cards. We also received envelopes stuffed with Credit Card Company CHECKS, to used “When and As needed”.
All this paper must be SHREDDED in shredders that consume increasing amounts of electricity etc etc etc.
The above referring to Credit Card companies is TRUE.
The above reference to Global warming....I’m kidding.
Chase pays 1-2% cashback and gives great service if you have good credit.
Chase pays 1-2% cashback and gives great service if you have good credit.
It is my fault. I use credit cards for convenience - like a debit card - and traditional banks for (secured, lower-rate) loans. I keep the credit limit very low, put the balance temporarily into the black for purchases over the limit, and never pay interest or fees. The credit card companies thus only derive from me indirect revenue via retailer/merchant fees/commission.
I am prepared to atone for my sins - send me the tax bill, destroy the value of my savings. I should have never learned addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
bump
My Visa accounts are through my credit union. Much more favorable terms. And they don’t treat me like I have herpes.
The guy carrying a balance is a credit risk!
HSBC are crooks and should be out out of business (the market should do that, not government)
It’s not happening to me, so it can’t be true!
No, they want to chase their highest risk customers away. They did pretty well before they became a credit card company.
This is less the “evil” credit card companies than them being caught between a rock an a hard place. The exception is AMEX, which is in very deep trouble because of its *banking* activities, and may fold because of them.
The problem lies in the fact that while the CC companies make a few billion dollars a year profit, that amount is tiny compared to the many billions of dollars they need to *borrow* to cover their cardholders debt.
They do this by issuing bonds. And they issue a lot of bonds. But right now, this puts them in competition with everybody else who wants investment dollars, especially the US government Treasury bills.
And because the government is on a spending spree, for the first time in a long time, something odd happened. The CC companies issued a bond, and nobody bought it. A bond failure. Instantly, this meant that the CC companies were in deep trouble.
What we are seeing right now is their reaction to just that *one* bond failure. Canceling inactive cards, and lowering credit limits. The CC companies trying to reduce their exposure, so they will be able to cover bondholder debt.
Importantly, they are also cutting those who always pay their bills on time, because they make very little profit for the CC companies compared to those that have some debt. And because card holders are lumped into “classes”, even if you are a good customer, if you are in a bad class, you can get cut as well.
But this shows a major threat in the future. Unless the US government stops spending money at a furious rate, more CC bond issues may fail, and with them, many people will lose their credit cards entirely. Since millions of Americans are dependent on their credit cards to meet their monthly expenses, they will be unable to pay rent or make other purchases.
The CC companies have little latitude in this, because even their profits can only cover a fraction of cardholder debt. They may even be forced into “card holidays”, where for the last few days of the month, suddenly nobody’s credit card works.