MarketWatch has a story here and the American Banker’s Pola Rocha and Kevin Wack take a deeper dive here (behind paywall but also available on Lexis). Former President Trump describes the cap as temporary. It looks like an attempt to pander to voters with credit card debt. It is also hard to reconcile with the fact that the former president’s CFPB dropped a case against a payday lender charging 950% interest. I don’t see how such a proposal could be adopted without Congress passing a statute, which obviously would make it much less likely to be enacted. As the American Banker article reports, industry observers predict that the industry would respond to such a cap by ending credit card lending. The National Consumer Law Center’s Chi Chi Wu anticipates that credit card issuers would increase fees, and that doing so would make it harder to comparison-shop for credit cards. This proposal even outdoes the consumer law professors who have called for a 36% cap, including former Utah gubernatorial candidate Chris Peterson, Natalie Martin, and Creola Johnson.
