Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of H.R. 3639, the Expedited CARD Reform for Consumers Act of 2009. I thank the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, BARNEY FRANK, for his leadership on this issue and so many others, and Senator Dodd for championing this issue in the Senate.
This bill would simply move up the effective date of the remaining provisions of the Credit Card Reform Act, which we passed earlier this year, from February 2010 to December 1, 2009, just in time for the holiday shopping season.
It is truly unfortunate that we are on the floor today having to take this step, but the credit card companies brought it on themselves. Rather than use the months after the date that it was signed into law in May to update their systems to get ready for the new reforms, they have used this time to raise interest rates unfairly at any time and for any reason on consumers retroactively on their balances, capturing many of them in never-ending cycles of debt. They are practicing the double-cycle billing, charging rates on interest that has already been paid and raising rates for unrelated reasons. Consumers are justly outraged, and they have come to their Congress Members and to this Congress asking for relief.
Just last week, the Pew Foundation issued a report that showed that interest rates have shot up by 20 percent--the average interest rate is 20 percent--and 90 percent of all credit card [Page: H12303] debt that is out there has had an interest rate increase since the President signed the bill into law.
The Pew report also found that 100 percent of bank cards were using practices that the Federal Reserve has called unfair, deceptive, and anticompetitive. This troubling information followed report after report from other not-for-profits, from other Members of Congress, from our constituents, and from the news media that have showed that interest rates have climbed 18 percent--in some cases 30 percent--for absolutely no reason for customers that are paying on time and not going over their limit.
The original implementation date for the bill that I proposed was 90 days after enactment, but many Members of this body wanted to give the credit card companies more time to implement the reforms to get their systems in place, yet they have used this time to gouge consumers and to raise rates. We had ended up, in deliberations with the bill, with a staged implementation rate, that in August of 2009 a notice would go in of 45 days of any rate increases, but the bulk of these reforms would go into place in February of 2010. What we are doing is moving this date up by 5 months, giving relief and protection to consumers and working to help them.
The extraordinary breadth and depth of the interest rate hikes that consumers are suffering from speak to the importance of passing this important bill. I thank my colleagues on both sides of the aisle that have been supportive, and especially to the chairman.
