2007-12-08, Secret History of the Credit Card (1)

Tonight on Frontline.
The average American family has eight (0% for life on transfer balances. ) credit cards. Plastic money have become both a necessity and a ticket to a better life. (Hawaii, yeah! )
A credit card is an extraordinary, unbelievably great convenience for the consumer.
But the credit card industry plays by its own rules.
I don't know any merchant in America who can change the price after you bought the item except credit card company.
Credit card banks earn record profits.
MBNA's profits last year, one and a half times that of McDonald's. But McDonald's was too tuned 1 up last year.
But the profits come at a price.
Now they've raised my rate to 19. 98. And I've not been late ever.
There are irritated, unhappy, dissatisfied customers in this industry. They are the new loan sharks in America.
I suddenly did imagine that some day we might have ended up creating a Frankenstein. Frankenstein, what do you mean Frankenstein?
Tonight, Frontline correspondent Lowell Bergman and the New York Times investigate the secrets of your credit card.

This may seem an unlikely place to begin a modern history of the credit card. More than a thousand miles from Wall Street and the paneled halls of the Federal Reserve in Washington. But this is where the credit card business first began to really take off.

This is Sioux Falls, South Dakota. A modest town of 140, 000, known for its cattle auctions 2 and meat-packing industry. It's a town which boasts a huge post office, big enough to service a city several times its size. Every day, millions of pieces of mail pass through here and from here, millions of credit card solicitations and bills are sent to mailboxes across America. And billions of dollars in credit card payments come in from around the world.

Today, Sioux Falls is one of the major credit card processing centers in the country. It all happened in Sioux Falls because a quarter of a century ago, times were hard in South Dakota. There was a nationwide recession with double-digit inflation. Money was very tight. South Dakota banks were issuing very few mortgages or loans of any kind.
Interest rates were going into orbit, they were climbing all the time.
Bill Janklow was then the governor of South Dakota.
When I became the governor of South Dakota, South Dakota had very tight historical laws on what you could charge to borrow. In other words, there was one interest rate by law that they could charge for new cars, another one for used cars. It was highly regulated what interest rates people could pay. What I'm trying to say is, we may have a law that said you could charge 9% but money cost 11%, so banks weren't loaning money.
To get the banks to issue loans, South Dakota decided 3 to eliminate its historic cap on interest rates, known as a Usury 4 Law.
We had actually changed some of our laws since '79. And we had previously 5 introduced legislation and passed legislation, and we were passing legislation to lift the ceilings on usury, so we could free up and get capital in South Dakota.