Some excellent, must read articles today about credit, credit cards, and the place of financial services in the (British) economy.
Steve Randy Waldman on the critical difference between transactional and revolving credit:
We won’t get very far in the debate about credit in the US economy if we fail to distinguish between transactional and revolving credit. These are two are fundamentally different products, and much ill has come from conflation of the two.
With that under your belt, there’s an article in Time’s blog that naturally follows.
There has been some chatter, nicely summed up on the cover of today’s New York Times, that if Congress legislates new regulations for credit-card companies (the Senate is due to vote on a bill today), conscientious customers who pay their balances off every month will suffer.
Finally, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times has an article, Why Britain has to curb finance.