Research & Analysis
CRL research shows that a majority of low- and middle-income families depend on credit cards to pay for basic living expenses or to deal with unexpected financial emergencies like a doctor’s visit. Their financial situation is ravaged by industry’s use of hidden fees and "penalty rates" and the order in which their credit card payments are applied.
Card issuers make credit more costly than necessary by manipulating payments to keep the highest-cost balances from being paid off and by imposing hidden, hard-to-understand penalty interest rates.
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- Highlights of the New Credit Card Rules: What They Do and Don’t Do
January 26, 2012Credit CARD Act of 2009 – Learn what the law does and does not cover.
- Credit Card Clarity: CARD Act Reform Works
June 1, 2011New credit card rules help consumers by making credit card pricing significantly clearer, new CRL research finds. New rules lower costs by spurring competition, making it harder for issuers to manipulate or arbitrarily raise prices.
- Numbers Game: The True Cost of Credit Card Mail Offers
October 25, 2010Credit card offers have grown increasingly complex over time. Using a straightforward measure of complexity—the total number of numeric figures that appear on a credit card direct mail offer—this report shows that offers to consumers were 2.5 times more complicated in 2009 than in 1999. In an encouraging sign, a decade-long trend toward complexity has eased since implementation of recent reforms contained in the Credit CARD Act of 2009.
- Analysis of Federal Reserve Research on Behavioral Scoring
August 11, 2010Analysis of Federal Reserve Research on Behavioral Scoring: On “Report to the Congress on Reductions of Consumer Credit Limits Based on Certain Information as to Experience or Transactions of the Consumer”
- A Just Fee or Just a Fee?
June 8, 2010CRL research report finds that even after the new credit card law and credit card reform, credit card late fees still penalize cardholders while increasing profits for credit card banks and credit card companies. Card issuers find multiple ways to charge customers for late payments that are unrelated to changing borrower behavior or covering losses. Late fees are just another way to raise credit card customer costs.
