@Anonymous wrote:
@unsungivy wrote:
Wait, wait.
So Amex refuses to ever lower the APR they assign you when you get the card (even if every other card you have with them is the best APR and that card is 20,+ years old), but now they're randomly increasing it without it being a penalty APR?
What the actual...? Come on AmEx. I like everything else about you, why you gotta be like this.
We see this with lots of issuers (the bit about increasing, not necessarily refusal to decrease!) Seems to come in batches, I remember lots of posts here when Chase did it. Basically "We are raising the interest rate because we can"
That's not actually a recent thing. More of a long term trend.
Remember in the 1990s when almost anyone could file bankruptcy and some people did it every 7 years like they were timing it to a Swiss watch (which was probably paid for with one of their credit cards) and the banks sent credit cards to Fluffy the Poodle in New Orleans, and the interest rate was 12%?
Then they said that if Congress made it so you'd have to be so destitute that it was like expecting a turnip to bleed to file a real bankruptcy, and it was every 8 years, and there was all this extra crap, they'd lower interest rates? The rate was about 14% then.
Then the Credit CARD Act passed and they jacked it up to about 17% to compensate for all those "Hahaha, poor people, amirite?" fees they'd been charging.
And now the average sits at about 22%. And that's just an average. Now, here we go again.
The truth is the banks set interest rates so sky high that they can absorb massive losses and still come out ahead. They drive so many people into the ground that if they weren't offering us all cards again after they ruined us the last time, there'd be few people to lend to.
In the 2000s I was dating an older man briefly. Mid 30s. I was in my early 20s. And he would joke about all the times he filed bankruptcy because they were letting him do it every 7 years. One time he even bought a boat he couldn't pay for knowing that by the time they took it back he'd just file bankruptcy again.
It's people like this that ruin it for everyone. I can attest that there were actually people like that out there. But in this day and age it's basically going to the hospital where they "name their own price" and mail you a bill that leads to the majority of bankruptcies, not even credit cards are as bad as they are.
