"Swingman" wrote in message
...

"Larry Jaques" wrote in message

bank would have been keel hauled for it. I wonder if a certain group
of old-line Sicilians runs the CC companies now.

No ... they're in Congress.

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Last update: 11/06/04


Actually, you can blame the Supreme Court and the former Govener of South
Dakota for letting loose the reins on credit card interest rates. There was
an interesting program on this a couple of days ago on PBS (maybe
"Frontline"?).

Supreme Court ruled that the usury laws of the state where the person making
the credit decision was located ruled. So if an Ohio employee of a New York
bank makes the decision to grant credit to a customer in California, Ohio
law rules. Then SoDak's govenor, in exchange for the promise of jobs from
Citibank and other big banks, led the charge to repeal SoDak's usury laws
that capped interest rates on credit cards. Banks moved their credit card
ops to SoDak and other states soon followed in repealing usury laws.

Tim