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Some lenders, such as USAA, are nudging up credit-score requirements across their auto loans, credit cards and personal loans. Bank of America Corp. and Capital One Financial Corp. recently raised fees and interest rates for some of their credit-card customers. And this month, Citigroup Inc.'s CitiFinancial Auto started charging higher auto-loan rates for borrowers with less-than-perfect credit..........
Barbara Johnson, vice president of USAA Federal Savings Bank, referring to the bank's credit cards, auto loans and personal loans. The bank has also scaled back credit-line increases in its credit-card business. "We used to offer frequent, automated line increases, and now, we've pulled back on that a little bit," she says................
Average credit-card approval rates across the industry have dropped by five percentage points to 35% over the past year, while credit lines for subprime borrowers have fallen to an average of $1,000 from $1,250 a year ago, according to Robert Hammer, chief executive of R.K. Hammer, a bank-card advisory firm...............
Another victim of the trend toward tightening credit: once-generous introductory credit-card offers. "We've seen the length of the introductory periods diminish on certain offers and more lenders offering introductory rates ranging from 2.9% and 6.9% instead of 0% financing offers," says Curtis Arnold, founder of CardRatings.com.
TheNewWorldMan wrote:
This will pass...either the system will right itself and credit will return to normal levels (and let's face it, consumer credit standards being tightened a bit would probably be a good thing for the country), or consumer credit will dry up.
If the latter, our FICO scores and inability to get CLIs will be the least of our worries, as we will be staring a severe recession or outright depression in the face, possibly as early as the first quarter of 2008.