[RawAlex]

The adjustments that the credit card companies are making are pretty much criminal in nature. I can understand re-evaluating people's credit, I can understand raising rates over time (in keeping with the default rate of overall credit, example). Heck, I can even understand adding fees for processing or other.

What isn't acceptable is to be doing all of the above at the same time in dramatic and short term fashion.

Moving someone's CC rate up from 8% to 15 to 16% overnight without warning is terrible. Adding service fees just to use the card or to receive a bill is terrible. Moving the minimum payment levels up by more than double is a recipe for disaster. In many ways, it appears that the credit card companies are trying very hard to make customers default.

I am suspecting that the credit card companies have been watching balanced owed numbers and started to realize that more people are getting desperate and are willing to run their credit cards up trying to keep from going broke. The CC companies know that if that happens, they will have to join a list of creditors and hope to get paid over a very long period of time. For what it is worth, it just isn't a very good time to be in the credit business - any credit business.

Overall, they appear to be going too far too quickly and way to agressively, and I think in the end they will find themselves regulated and no longer able to do these things, which will in turn lead to tighter credit requirements and fewer cards in circulation.