October 02, 2009
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"Win / Win" or "No Deal", Pt.1
That means you, HSBC.We're being pummeled by a few bad apples in the credit card industry. It's time to stand up and fight back. Congress is behind us, by the way. Already, they're springing into action to protect us further. They were gracious enough to allow the credit card issuing banks almost a year to clean up their acts. Most have already done that, to their stead. But, as always, there will be a few bad apples to ruin it for the rest. They must be stopped and surely they shall be. Rep. Barney Frank chairman of the House Financial Services Committee is disgusted with it all. These "bad apple credit card issuers" were given a full nine months to implement the regulations in Senator Dodd's bill which was signed into law by Mr. Obama back in May. It appears that the only thing these bad banks have done in that time was to greedily grab everything they could from defenseless consumers before the time was up.
Because of this flagrant abuse, a U.S. House panel has already scheduled a meeting next week (Oct 8) to do something about it. They are getting ready to legislate a reduction in the remaining grace period back from next February to December first of this year for credit card regulation compliance. Meanwhile though, it appears that we credit card consumers will have to fend for ourselves. Millions of Americans have already been railroaded with sky-high interest hikes, credit limits reduced to squat and barraged with every different new fee and penalty these banks could think of.
In my experience, HSBC seem to be the biggest violators (Wells Fargo is not far behind, however). The following portions of this series will illustrate some of the extreme hardships being placed on good and honest credit card consumers who have done nothing wrong.