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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2024-01-31  36
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 do consumers never expect, according to the passage?
选项 A、The higher rates now can affect balances in the past.
B、Lenders can figure out so many ways to extract fees.
C、They can borrow from the banks easily.
D、They have to pay both fees and interest.
答案 A
解析 第5段第1句表明消费者对于第4段提到的银行的做法是始料未及的，答案要从第4段寻找。A是第4段最后一句提到的一种收取费用的方法，为本题答案。本题B干扰性极强，但从第5段第1句中的定语从句看，可知消费者不是因为借贷者能想出如此多的收费方法而感到震惊，而是因为这些方法居然不算违法而感到震惊。
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