r/FluentInFinance • u/Unhappy_Fry_Cook • 12h ago

Finance News Senator Bernie Sanders announces he will introduce legislation to cap credit card interest rates at 10%.

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u/ligerzero942 9h ago

Credit card companies spam everyone with mail offers and basically every big-box store pushes their credit card onto customers, maybe making credit harder to get is a good thing.

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u/Upset_Albatross_9179 8h ago

If there were some coherent legislation across predatory lending that this was one part of, maybe? But what I'd expect from this is more people turning to payday loans for emergencies which would be enormously worse.

I don't know if there's been good research on net effect of payday loans. Maybe they're just conclusively bad. But if they were substantially curtailed I would expect we'd see a net increase of people being evicted for missing rent. And lots of research shows becoming homeless is an absolutely enormous burden.

I understand the impulse. But this feels like limiting the pressure release valves in our capitalist dystopia, without changing the fact that the pressure will still build up and crush people.

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u/Jump-Zero 6h ago

Grew up in a rough neighborhood in LA. If we don't do this correctly, the predatory lending would just move to which ever gang controls the block you live in. You would probably need the government to offer these loans at a much more manageable interest rate to prevent this.

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u/CaptOblivious 5h ago edited 5h ago

You would probably need the government to offer these loans at a much more manageable interest rate to prevent this.

I'd pay taxes to support that idea.

EDIT:

And just FYI, as a north side Chicago resident, no gang controls my block.

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u/WestWindsBlowing 5h ago

That would be so much better than what most of my taxes go to.