LOL! Sure they will.
You see, every successful company in America attracts droves of loyal customers by screwing them over as much as possible.
>>You see, every successful company in America attracts droves of loyal customers by screwing them over as much as possible.
But the goal in the Obamanation is not to be successful. The goal is to be “too big to fail” and then to fail. Then, the economic geniuses in DC will steal money from people who do what’s right and give it to you to continue the bad business practices that got you in trouble in the first place.
The idea is to discredit capitalism in the minds of the productive citizens, so that even we start demanding “our share” of the public pie.
You are right, the banks are so used to using their political power to generate profits that they think that they can use this kind of threat to generate support.
Raising interest rates and imposing extra fees will just drive customers away, reducing their income. Credit card users with plenty of income — the folks who pay off their balance every month and have the 800 credit scores — don’t really need a credit card. They can easily switch to a debit card, leaving the bank much less room to make money.
Apart from merchant fees, the banks depend on the interest income they get from people who don’t pay their balances in full every month. A lot of the banks got greedy and went after the higher profits that can be earned by predatory lending — driving up interest rates on customers with balances that they can’t immediately repay.
The risk in that business isn’t that the customers can’t repay the balance, but that they can’t keep up with a 33% interest rate. If the banks were worried about defaults, and loss of principal they wouldn’t push up the rates so high. In non predatory financing you ease the terms when the customer is less able to pay, in order to improve the chance of recovering the principal amount. But when you have been collecting interest at 33% you’re really more interested in the interest stream than the principal.
For the banks the ideal customer is the person who is creditworthy enough to try to keep current, but unable to pay off the balance. Without the ability to jack up the interest rates at will on their target customer they will not be able to generate as much predatory profit. That’s too bad for them. The country is better served by other business models, even if the profits of a few major banks are reduced as a result.