The Credit CARD Act of 2009 instructed the Federal Reserve to enact new regulations for gift cards. I have a love/hate relationship with gift cards; they’re convenient gifts to give when you know the recipient is a fan of a certain store. Unfortunately, the past few years have seen restrictions added to gift cards which make them unappealing. Some gift cards expire if not used within a certain amount of time, rendering the money spent to buy the card worthless. Some gift cards come with a monthly fee or an inactivity fee.
It makes more sense to simply give cash rather than a gift card, eliminating the third-parties like stores and payment processors and eliminating any limitations to its use. This avoids the issue of whether fees should be charged for these products. But some people consider the gift of cash inappropriate, more than those who consider the gift of gift cards inappropriate. Thus, the Congress and now the Federal Reserve wants to protect those who choose to buy and those who receive gift cards.
The new regulations call for an elimination of inactivity fees (until the card has been inactive for a year) and eliminations of fees for balance inquiries and transactions. All of the changes to gift cards by law do not need to be made effective until August 22, 2010.
The Federal Reserve is preparing to accept comments from the public for thirty days. You can read the full proposed regulation and in the next few days, you can begin to submit your comments to the Fed here. (Look for Regulation E, R-1377.) Here are some questions to consider as you formulate your comments:
- Are these restrictions necessary when consumers can easily choose not to purchase gift cards?
- Would better disclosure be better than restricting fees?
- There is a cost to offering gift cards; how should stores pay for those expenses if not with fees?
- Should all gift card fees be eliminated, so gift cards are as good as cash in all cases?
- Why wait until August 22? Can the new regulations be implemented sooner?
Photo credit: _rockinfree
Whether due to the economy or the impending regulation enacted within the Credit CARD Act of 2009, credit card companies are taking the opportunity to raise interest rates and minimum payments. This is perhaps an unintended consequence of increasing regulation. These changes affect consumers with manageable debt, but others who are trying to get out of debt or living paycheck-to-paycheck are harder hit by these changes.
Issuers’ actions come as a growing number of consumers lose their jobs and default in record numbers on their credit card debt. The industry is also preparing for restrictions to take effect in February 2010… The banking industry says Congress has no one to blame but itself for higher rates and fees because banks had predicted that restrictions on pricing would lead to higher costs for everyone…
Yet some critics say that issuers are taking advantage of a loophole in the law to bolster their financial conditions… In a statement Monday, [Senator Charles] Schumer slammed issuers for trying to “wring more dollars out of their customers.” Some of the changes in card terms, Schumer says, are “against the spirit of the law and … just plain wrong.”
Is credit card reform — the Credit CARD Act of 2009 (Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights) — a mistake or are issuers just using the fear of losing future profits as an excuse for bilking customers now?
Consumers hit again as some banks raise credit rates, fees, Kathy Chu, USA Today, June 30, 2009
The White House is proposing a realignment of the financial regulation that failed to prevent the latest recession, but will the proposals help protect consumers? There is a long way to go between the President’s proposal and the enactment of a law, but here are the highlights as the plan stands today.
The Financial Services Oversight Council, run by the Treasury, will “help fill gaps in regulation, facilitate coordination of policy and resolution of disputes, and identify emerging risks in firms and market activities.” They will have the power to gather information from any financial firm to identify risks. The Council will be composed of one leader from each of the federal financial regulators.
Not only banks will be regulated. Any company whose size allows its instability to threaten the stability of the economy will be within the scope of the increased regulation.
There will be no more federal thrifts.
Hedge funds and other private pools of capital will be required to registers with the SEC.
The government will create the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). This agency stands to be one of the strongest in terms of ability to create and enforce regulations throughout the financial industry. The organization will focus on transparency, simplicity, fairness, accountability, and access.
Along with the elimination of federal thrifts, the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) will also disappear or be incorporated into other regulatory agencies. Interestingly, this is the one regulator bankers like. In the current environment, financial companies can often shop around for their favorite regulator, and the OTS has often been chosen thanks to their hands-off approach. OTS was the supervisor of choice for the failed companies IndyMac, Countrywide, Washington Mutual, and AIG. Other regulators were not immune, however.
Just like the FDIC helps banks fail in an organized manner rather than allowing the failure to spur chaos, the new regulatory system would do the same for all other large financial companies.
Penelope Wang from CNN explains how these regulations might affect consumers.
- Consumers will have access to “plain-vanilla” mortgages with simple terms and pricing. In my opinion, these are almost guaranteed to be more expensive thanks to the simplicity premium.
- Brokers will not be encouraged to “suggest” customers choose unaffordable mortgages.
- Some overdraft loan changes will require customers to opt in to overdraft protection.
- Regulators would enforce fair lending laws so more low-income families would have access to financial services.
New Foundation, New Stability, Jesse Lee, The White House, June 17, 2009
How Obama’s Financial Watchdog Could Protect You, Penelope Wang, CNN, June 17, 2009
Many economists are citing the lack of regulation of the financial markets as one of the primary causes of the recent economic collapse. Alan Greenspan, once a believer in deregulation, blames the crisis on the financial industry’s inability to monitor itself. A pattern of financial deregulation over the past two and a half decades paved the way for financial companies to experience sky-high profits. This is good for the economy in the short-term, but it resulted in economic bubbles that damaged the economy outside of the finance industry, eventually bringing down the biggest banks and brokerages.
In 1999, Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which was originally passed amidst the stock market crash of 1929 to separate banking businesses from brokerage businesses, but the breakdown of this regulation began in 1980 with the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act. The law was repealed to allow banks to better compete with brokerages when selling products that may not be clearly defined as “bank products” or “brokerage products” and to allow American financial companies to better compete with international financial institutions that were not bound to such regulations.
Regulatory bodies, like the FDIC, OTS, and SEC still remain, however. Even with no oversight of complex financial derivatives like collateralized debt obligations, credit-default swaps, and the hedge funds that invest in them, regulators should have warned us better of the impending financial collapse. Is this a failure of regulators, proving oversight just gets in the way of business? Perhaps, as some politicians argue, too much regulation has tied the financial industry’s hands, leaving them unable to make the decisions that needed to be made in order to prevent a financial crisis.
Was it the excessive government involvement in the economy, with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae as the examples, that spurred this recession or the lack of effective oversight allowing financial institutions to place risky bets without cash collateral?
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