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  3. Costly—sometimes abusive—credit cards are bleeding millions of borrowers who

Costly—sometimes abusive—credit cards are bleeding millions of borrowers who

游客2024-01-29  28
问题     Costly—sometimes abusive—credit cards are bleeding millions of borrowers who didn’t know what they were getting into.
    The bottom-feeding cards—for people with damaged credit—offer you a decent interest rate on credit lines "up to" $3,000. When the card arrives, however, your line might be only $250. And then come the fees! They’re charged to your tiny credit line, leaving you almost nothing to spend.
    Two better-known card issuers with a big loan business are Capital One and HSBC’s Orchard Bank. They charge lower upfront fees than other cards do. But if you fall behind, it’s tough. Cap One’s penalty rate is currently 28.15 percent. Orchard Bank doesn’t disclose its penalty rate online and wouldn’t tell you what it is. Cap One has a reputation for issuing multiple cards to people who bump up against their credit limits. That gives them two cards, with two low limits, to overspend.
    Lenders have figured out many ways of extracting fees. There’s "universal default", where a late payment on one card can trigger high penalty rates on every card you own. There’s the "endless late fee", where your payments never catch up with the new penalties you’re charged. There’s "two-cycle billing"—too complicated to explain here, but which amounts to charging interest on balances that you’ve already paid. And "retroactive (追溯的) price hikes," where banks impose higher rates on old balances as well as new ones.
    These practices startle consumers who think such high fees and interest rates must be against the law. But the Supreme Court effectively deregulated credit card rates 30 years ago, and 10 years ago it deregulated the size of the fees a bank could charge. Prior to fee deregulation, late fees hovered between $13 and $15, says Robert McKinley of CardWeb.com, which tracks the business. Now they run from $30 to $40. "It’s out of control," he says. "Banks know they’ve pushed this too far."
    This year, however, the new Congress started holding hearings. Suddenly Citi dropped universal default and JPMorgan Chase ended two-cycle billing. But those are just gestures. Without fee caps or laws restricting the usually high rate of interest, we’re in the bankers’ hands. [br] What does the author think about the "multiple cards" practice of Cap One?
选项 A、The bank may have more bad debts.
B、The bank may become more popular.
C、Borrowers may have their credit limits increased.
D、Borrowers may fall into a multiple-penalty trap.
答案 D
解析 第3段前三句表明Cap One开卡的费用很优惠，但是一旦不能按期还款，受到的处罚会很重。再看本段最后两句，Cap One向消费达到其信用额度的人发多张卡，这些人本身信用额度低，但拥有了多张卡后更容易超支了，超支后还款的能力又不强，这时Cap One就可以对他们罚款，从中赚取费用，由此可确定应选D。
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