Friends in High (or is it Low?) Places

One of the advantages of having lived in New York for 19 years is the assortment of friends you accumulate. My pals were loads of fun in their twenties and thirties, but now that we're tipping over into our forties, a lot of them are pretty doggone impressive.One of them is my pal, Jill, a lawyer with an in-depth and inside view of the banking crisis. She's my go-to girl when something outrageous is happening with the bailout and I need an explanation. I usually go to her hoping that she'll calm me down and tell me that everything makes sense. Sadly though, she's usually even more outraged than I am. And she knows these people. Intimately.The latest outrage?Interest rate hikes on credit cards. The worst so far is Capital One which is raising interest rates to 29%, regardless of how good your credit is. Their reason? To quote Jill:

They have to raise the interest rates on the money they lent to us because they need to raise the money to pay back the bailout money they borrowed from us. Do I really need to point out the multiple ironies about this? Aaarrrrrgggg!"

Now to be clear, this is not some uninformed schmuck like me writing "Aaarrrrrgggg!" in an early morning email. This is a woman deeply enmeshed in exactly the kind of under-handed, book-cooking bullshit that got us into this mess. She represents people involved.She continues:

Another pathetic aspect of this is that the banking lobby (which is extremely powerful and very well funded) will likely use their own interest-raising activities (and the public outcry from same) to argue for getting large amounts of bailout debt wiped off the books and/or the banks' repayment terms eased. The even sadder thing, if the bank lobby is successful in getting their repayment terms eased, they will not lower the interest rates for us anyway.I am writing all of my elected officials to push for regulations to retroactively ban banks from raising interest rates on any credit card or debt holder. However, I am not even one-one hundredth as powerful as the bank lobby, so I doubt my efforts will have any impact whatsoever.

Her advice? Get rid of your debt now or call your credit card or bank to lock in your rate before it's too late.