Free Republic

Livin’ la vida Biden! The Biden Administration has got a line on you! Unfortunately that line is choking America’s middle class and low wages workers with inflation and rising interest rates. Auto loan rates are now up to 7.65%, a gut-wrenching 166% increase under Bidenomics. Average monthly payments also reached a new record of $733. That compares with $730 in the first quarter and $678 in the second quarter of 2022. Buyers were financed with an average APR of around 7.1%, the highest since the fourth quarter of 2007. 2 out of every 3 consumers who agreed to a $1,000+...

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will introduce legislation to create a national cap on interest rates for credit cards. The Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez legislation would limit credit card annual percentage rates to 15%. Current credit card annual percentage interest rates typically range from the mid-teens to high 20s, depending on a person’s credit score. “Every major religion on Earth ... has condemned usury because it is really disgusting,” said Sanders, a Vermont independent senator who is also a leading candidate in the Democratic presidential primary. “What Alexandria and I are proposing in this legislation is not complicated ... Bringing back the concept...

There is a new kind of technology out there -- the automatic plate reader. Installed in a police car, it can currently auto-scan an average of 700 license plates-per-hour. That will continue to improve. And it red-flags every dirty plate in sight. Ohio already uses it, but Ohio [for example] customized its system to ignore petty crimes. That is how powerful it is -- APR must be programmed to ignore the 'small stuff'. Even if a criminal switches plates, technology could easily fix that problem, such as a scanning bar and ID tag on the dashboard. They would need to...

If you have bad credit in the new era of credit card regulation, be prepared to pay -- dearly -- for the privilege of using credit. That's the message underlying recent credit card offers that feature jaw-dropping interest rates of up to 79.9 percent. The sky-high rates may be a sign of things to come in the market for so-called subprime credit cards as issuers who lend to the riskiest of borrowers try to figure out how to stay in business and comply with the new credit card reform law. "We need to price our product based on the risk...