5 Good Reasons to Always Check Your Credit Card Statements

If you are in the habit of routinely filing your credit card statements without so much as glancing at the list of charges, you could be losing money without knowing it.
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Just when you can use some extra money, credit card companies are making deep cuts

After years of flooding Americans with credit card offers and sky-high credit lines, lenders are sharply curtailing both, just as an eroding economy squeezes consumers.

The pullback is affecting even creditworthy consumers and threatens an already beleaguered banking industry with another wave of heavy losses after an era in which it reaped near record gains from the business of easy credit that it helped create.
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U.S. banks tighten credit card lending too late

Closing millions of accounts, cutting credit lines and raising interest rates are just some of the moves credit card issuers are using to try to inoculate themselves from a tsunami of expected consumer defaults.
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Did God want you to get that mortgage?

Has the so-called Prosperity gospel turned its followers into some of the most willing participants — and hence, victims — of the current financial crisis?

That’s what a scholar of the fast-growing brand of Pentecostal Christianity believes.
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U.S. Federal Reserve Orders Emergency Rate Cut to 1.5 Percent

The U.S. Federal Reserve and a consortium of European central banks today announced a half a point cut in a key interest rate, a coordinated effort to stave off an economic slump even as they continue struggling to tackle a crisis in global financial markets.
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Sold to US taxpayers for $700B: banks’ bad assets

What started as a fairly simple three-page proposal giving the Treasury Secretary unchecked power to orchestrate a bailout of the country’s financial system ended up as a complex rescue package, with enhanced congressional oversight, some added protections for taxpayers and a slap on the wrist to highly paid, underperforming executives.
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Historic $700 billion bailout deal reached

In the short run, congressional leaders have achieved their goal of producing an agreement Sunday on a federal bailout of banks and other financial institutions holding bad mortgage debts before the world’s stock markets reopened.
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Bush: Bail Out Economy, or Face ‘Long and Painful Recession’

President Bush went before the nation last night to argue for his administration’s proposed $700 billion bailout of the financial system, which has been met with skepticism by some in Congress and the American public.
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Credit card insiders tell of deceptive practices

Two former employees of credit card issuer MBNA, now owned by Bank of America, said on Wednesday they were forced to use aggressive and deceptive practices with customers in order to boost revenues.
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Credit Cards: Finally a Little Good News for The Little Guy

The bill would make it a lot easier for the humble consumer to get a fair deal from the credit card companies. It would eliminate a variety of tricks and traps of the credit card business, like retroactive interest rate hikes.
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