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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2024-02-03  66
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] The word "deregulate" (Line 3, Para. 5) can best be replaced by _____.
选项 A、impose rules on
B、lift the control on
C、rule against
D、specify
答案 B
解析 第5段中除了第2句有deregulate这个词外，第3句有这个词的名词形式deregulation，第3句的Prior to fee deregulation和第4句的Now表明现在的信用卡利率与过去相比高很多，而最后一句开头的It’s out of control表明现在的信用卡利率“已经失控”了，由此可见，在Prior to fee deregulation时，信用卡利率是由政府控制的，故推断deregulate意为“解除(规定、控制)”。
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