There's no question more consumers could have been smarter about how they deal with easy credit, but the same could also be said about Wall Street, yet they received a fat bailout. When a friend of mine told me a few years ago about his baby daughter receiving a "pre-approved" credit card it seemed obvious that the industry had gone too far. As much as I try to stick to cash and avoid plastic, the fact remains that having access to credit can be helpful in many ways and it helped the US and UK economies grow. Industry insisted that if they were regulated or limited, it would destroy everything but they managed to do that on their own. Now it's time to install proper oversight and regulation. If only it wasn't Summers in the lead. It's hard to trust him any more than the credit card companies themselves.
Top White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers said Obama would be "very focused in the very near term on a whole set of issues having to do with credit card abuses."
"We need to do things to stop the marketing of credit in ways that addict people to it," Summers said in an interview on the NBC television talk show "Meet the Press."
Summers, director of the White House National Economic Council, said the administration is concerned about practices that result in consumers being "deceived into paying extraordinarily high rates that they wouldn't have paid if they knew they were getting themselves into."
