Credit card craziness

Banks charging people money for paying off their balances in full on their credit cards. Other banks jacking interest rates up to 30 percent on credit cards. I’d love to talk to the people who were in those meetings, and recreate the logic behind them. It does not jibe with the kind of benevolent capitalism I keep hearing about from people I’m interviewing. Though as one person said to me, “if there were an immoral business person in the paper every day, that would be 365 people. That’s not very many people compared to the millions of business people who want to do things right.”

He had his point. But in truth, we tend to cover the worst things, not all the things that happen. Here’s a piece in USA Today that I wish were ironic instead of depressingly true. That bit about how closing a credit card hurts your credit rating just reminds us that markets always have friction.