Banking, finance, and taxes

Credit Card Interest Rates Keep Rising

If you have been expecting that all of the lower rates and all of the government bailout money was going to make your credit cards cheaper, perhaps you may need to rethink the scenario.  The TARP and TALF money may…

By Douglas A. McIntyre
Published April 2, 2009, 4:36pm ET · 1 min read

Invalid Image
If you have been expecting that all of the lower rates and all of the government bailout money was going to make your credit cards cheaper, perhaps you may need to rethink the scenario.  The TARP and TALF money may have kept these from getting even higher, but banking institutions are actually still very concerned about the waves of unemployed borrowers out there and probably the waves of underemployed or leveraged borrowers on the streets as well.  A report from CreditCards.com is showing how rates are not getting cheaper for borrowers, although this does not include the low “teaser” rates which many borrowers get when they sign up.

CARD SECTOR…… Avg.APR. Week Ago. 6Mo.Ago
National Average.. 12.35%… 12.00%… 11.38%
Instant Approval.. 11.49%… 11.29%… 11.58%
Balance Transfer… 11.52%… 11.18%… 10.08%
Bad Credit………… 11.79%… 11.79%… 10.87%
Low Interest……… 12.29%… 11.83%… 10.73%

We saw further gains in rates on rewards cards, cash back, and airline issue cards.  The surprise was on the bad credit side, because it stayed flat from last week at 11.79% (up from 10.87% six months ago).  But the other surprise was cards for students.  That also stayed flat at 14.9% week over week and has only risen 0.24% over the last six months.

JON C. OGG
April 2, 2009

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

All articles →