Record Debt, Record Fees
Americans’ credit card debt has hit a new record: $1.21 Trillion!
And, that’s at a time when the average credit card interest rate is 24.21%.
So, if credit card debt and interest stayed at those levels this year, the Wall Street banks and other issuers of credit cards would be in line to make . . . $292.941 billion in interest this year.
That is a huge jump from the $100 billion in interest payments that banks made off of consumers credit card debt in 2022...
- ... and that doesn’t even count late fees ($14.5 billion in 2022), annual fees ($6.4 billion in 2022), and more ($4 billion in non-sufficient funds and other fees that banks took from credit card consumers in 2022).
At the same time, credit card swipe fees charged to merchants on Visa and Mastercard credit cards alone have exploded from $61.63 billion in 2020 to $100.77 billion in 2023. That’s a 63.5% increase!
And Visa increased its fees again in January.
Wait, didn’t the credit card industry tell everyone in Congress that taking lots of fees from merchants made them treat customers better?
That’s what they said. It just turns out that isn’t true. Not only do the numbers above make that clear, but so do studies and economists as you can see here and here.
The bottom line is that the credit card cartel structure set up by Visa and Mastercard takes advantage of American consumers and Main Street businesses. The credit card cartels get more and more addicted to extracting big fees and interest payments from everyone.
So, unless we make a change, American consumers and businesses will keep getting hurt and the credit card giants will keep laughing … all the way to the bank.
COMPETITION IS BETTER FOR EVERYONE
IT'S TIME TO PASS THE CREDIT CARD COMPETITION ACT