Banks' credit card bluster rings hollow

I just love it when the credit card industry threatens to take its toys and go home.

That, in effect, was what card issuers said in response to the announcement by federal regulators last week that they planned to crack down on some of the industry's more consumer-unfriendly practices.

To increase fairness, the Federal Reserve and two other agencies would, among other things, require card issuers to mail out statements at least 21 days before a payment's due date and prohibit issuers from applying partial payments only to balances with the lowest interest rates -- thus leaving costlier, higher-rate balances intact.

Edward Yingling, president of the American Bankers Assn., said in a statement that the Fed's proposals represent "an unprecedented regulatory intrusion into marketplace pricing and product offerings."

He said the measures would "result in less competition, higher consumer prices, fewer consumer choices and reduced consumer access to credit cards."

In other words, if the industry had to play by the proposed rules, it wouldn't be able to offer as much plastic to as many people.

Nonsense. No amount of regulation has ever resulted in card issuers scaling back their offerings. More than 5 billion solicitations were mailed to U.S. households last year alone.

But if banks suddenly decided not to make plastic as readily available to people with spotty credit records, fine. All things considered, that would probably be a good thing.

Just ask Victoria Ramirez. The San Jose elementary school teacher once had as much as $45,000 in debt on six different cards.

Now she and her husband have whittled that down to a balance of about $10,000 on a single card.

Ramirez, 37, said card issuers make it all too easy to get into trouble.

"They loan you a big amount of money that you can't take care of," she said.

This isn't so different from what's happening in the housing market. One reason so many people are in danger of losing their homes right now is because banks handed out high-risk loans to folks who had no business getting deep into debt.

To be sure, many such loan recipients deserve a share of the blame for being so reckless with their personal finances. But they wouldn't have gotten into trouble without the willing complicity of lenders, which encouraged virtually all home buyers to take the plunge, regardless of their ability to repay loans.

According to the Fed, Americans are now carrying $951.7 billion in revolving credit card debt, up 5.9% from a year ago. The average household with credit card debt runs a balance of about $8,000.

We could use a little tough love. Efforts to teach people to be more debt-savvy clearly haven't worked out. (The banking industry's "education" programs have always struck me as being much like the tobacco industry's programs to discourage smoking. Somehow they just don't seem sincere.)

Yingling of the American Bankers Assn. said he found the Fed's proposed safeguards "particularly perplexing" because they'd result in "a reduction in credit availability at the very time the Fed is working to increase access to credit in the marketplace."

Perhaps he'd be less perplexed if he understood that the Fed isn't seeking a credit free-for-all out there. What it wants, and what consumers should have, is access to the credit that they're qualified to handle.

Of course, that's not what the banking industry is about. Lenders collected a record $18.1 billion in credit card penalty fees last year, up 69% from 2003, according to consulting firm R.K. Hammer Investment Bankers in Thousand Oaks.

Banks aren't about to cut back on credit for anyone. Why? Because they don't care whether consumers can handle debt. Cynical as it may be to say, they're happiest when we can't.