Record numbers of Americans squeezed by consumer debt are declaring bankruptcy to escape crushing balances on their too-easy-to-get credit cards.
Many of the bankrupts are minimum-wage earners barely able to feed and house themselves, let alone meet even the minimum monthly payments on plastic bait dangled without restrictions by greedy financiers.
What happened to collateral, ability to pay, minimum incomes and other requirements that borrowers had to produce or demonstrate before receiving loans? Houses, boats and vehicles can be repossessed easily, but not the thousands of other consumer products routinely purchased with credit cards.
Financial institutions deserve to lose heavily for failing to ensure that their credit-card users had the means to pay back the loans. Instead, financial institutions want to deny their deadbeat victims the legal avenues to salvage their lives.
Credit-card debtors already are figuratively imprisoned by usurous interest rates and arbitrary penalties imposed by lenders. A physical prison ought to be created for greedy credit-card financiers preying on the ignorant and gullible.(19 SEPTEMBER 1999)
