Credit Addiction

In September 2008 when Lehman Brothers' failure kick-started the current recession, the UK Base Rate was 5%. The typical credit card rate levied by the major UK bankers was then around 18 to 20% APR. This realised the major banks a profit margin of around 250 to 300%. Not bad.

Since the recession - THAT THEY ALONE CAUSED AND WHOSE BAILOUT WE ALONE ARE FUNDING TO THE TUNE OF £15,000 PER MAN WOMAN AND CHILD - bankers have seen their cost of cash fall to exactly one tenth of what it was pre-recession - just 0.5% these days.

Today I am truly gob-smacked. There I was, just checking my emails on the BTintenet website when my eye spotted a credit card advert and the rate they now have the audacity to charge for credit.

Their 40% APR represents an 8,000% profit margin! Yes, that's an EIGHT THOUSAND PER CENT PROFIT MARGIN, a margin some 30 TIMES GREATER THAN THEY EARNED PRE-RECESSION.

Does your average Joe not recognise them for the pimps that they are? No wonder their profits are already back to almost the highest level they ever reached just prior to the crash. The bastards. I am absolutely incensed even though fortunately, I don't conform to the typical Briton. For if I did, I would be part of the swathe of people who are in debt up to their necks (and more) being comprehensively ripped off by the bankers. I would be one of the very people they inveigled into taking out yet more credit by mailing us yet more unsolicited credit cards, a tactic that has resulted in we British being the most indebted per capita of any citizen in the Western world.

Put it another way, think of bankers as drug dealers and pimps and you won't be far wrong. First they get you hooked on spending and then when you have an incredibly high dependance and crave more of their credit (though you cannot really afford increased repayments), they dangle new credit cards in your face and suggest you 'consolidate' all your debts into one new card offering a mythical ZERO PER CENT (but in reality, charging a higher interest rate of course). Then these sharks raise the price of their credit until not only the pips squeek but the entire lemon in your hand is so dry that it turns to dust. And when it looks like you're dead with a NEGATIVE credit rating and CCJs hanging over your head, they offer you a 'no questions asked' credit card at an even higher rate. That's how they get their rates to 40% and how people are tempted.

I am as sorry for the idiots who took out more and more credit to fund an unwarranted life-style of big houses, fast cars and expensive holidays in the same way as I am sympathetic for drug addicts who started smoking pot but who have been tricked into using harder and harder more damaging and addictive drugs. The parallels are many though.

But the bankers are the real bastards, And I speak as a shareholder too. These bastards need to be publically executed alongside drug dealers.

S-L-O-W-L-Y - using piano wire.

The whole damn lot of them.