America

America and American Express

What would you do with 900 Billon dollars? (Robert H. Scott, 2007) That’s the staggering numbers associated with credit card debt here in the United States; it has really gotten out of hand. Robert H. Scott wrote in an article acknowledging this deficit and how it came about. Looking at the average American household we average eight credit cards per household and with the eight credit cards, its used to charge about 2 trillion dollars’ worth of goods in a wide variety annually.

Surprisingly the credit card is not a new form of payment. The credit card was introduced in the early nineteen hundreds. In the beginning credit cards were not used by everyone, they were mainly to be used by retail stores and also oil companies to increase sales and make identifying customers easier for retailers. By the early eighties most people thought of credit cards as a high living commodity for the upper class people with high credit and good reputation with banks. The most influential move that really rendered at real strain on credit card debt was the Marquette Decision. The Marquette Decision created a “yellow brick road” for credit card companies. The Marquette decision stated that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that credit card issuers could charge out-of-state customers whatever rate was legal in the issuer's home state, igniting a race among the states to attract banks by removing their usury caps on interest rates. In hind sight the Marquette Decision gave the bank permission to credit card companies to ignore your state's usury law, which limits the amount of interest that can be charged on a loan so they can charge whatever they like.

After the Marquette Decision credit card use blossomed into a sport it seems like everyone was using credit cards to buy everything. Today, there are more than 1.5 billion credit cards in circulation in the United States alone. (Robert H. Scott, 2007)

Something’s that can contribute to the start of credit...