Credit cards: use and consumer attitudes, 1970-2000

From modest origins in the 1950s as a convenient way for the relatively well-to-do to settle restaurant and department store purchases without carrying cash, credit cards have become a ubiquitous financial product held by households in all economic strata. Since the late 1960s, much federal legislation has been enacted to ensure that consumers have the protections and information they need to use this widely available form of open-end credit wisely. Nevertheless, concerns persist about whether consumers fully understand the costs and implications of using credit cards and whether credit cards have encouraged widespread overindebtedness. Drawing on information from commercial banks, credit reporting agencies, and surveys of consumers, this article explores these issues as well as changes over the past three decades in consumer impressions of their card-using experiences and of conditions in the marketplace.Credit cards ; Consumer behavior

History shows us that we should not be overly concerned with the recent growth in consumer credit

With the economy now in recovery in the aftermath of the Great Recession, consumers’ use of credit it once again on the rise. Thomas A. Durkin looks at whether or not we should be concerned with this resurgent growth in consumer credit. He argues that while some consumers do have debt troubles, the growth in the credit using proportion of low income consumers has been small since the 1960s. As was the case in the past, the bulk of outstanding consumer credit is currently owed by those with higher incomes

Recent developments in home equity lending

The equity that has accumulated in homes is one of the largest components of U.S. household wealth. In recent years, many homeowners have borrowed large amounts against that equity, frequently to finance new consumption expenditures or pay down outstanding consumer debt. In view of the growing importance of home equity credit in household finances, the Federal Reserve has for a number of years participated in nationwide surveys of the use of home equity loans. This article presents findings from a 1997 survey and from other sources of information on home equity lending.Home equity loans

TILA ‘Finance’ and ‘Other’ Charges in Open-End Credit: The Cost-of Credit Principle Applied to Charges for Optional Products or Services

The thesis of this article is that a more workable approach to characterizing fees for optional products and services is possible by focusing on charges that represent payment for discrete products or services of value to the consumer, freely chosen by consumers as contract options which do not affect the amount of credit available to the consumer, the consumer\u27s access to it, or the allocation of payment responsibility and credit risk in the transaction or plan. In other words, these fees are for separate-or separable-purchases, analogous to subsequent events in closed-end credit that require no new disclosure or adjustment in the disclosed finance charge. 20 The primary focus of this article is on open-end credit because it involves greater interpretive and operational challenges. This article first explains, in Part II, the critical role of finance charges and other charges as costs imposed in credit transactions and thus elements in the TILA disclosure scheme. Part III provides a broad overview of the marketing and economic considerations that influence how creditors price their products, concluding that there is a long-accepted economic framework for identifying the true costs of credit. The next section, Part IV, analyzes the existing legal guidance on whether and when charges for optional products or services are finance charges or other charges in the TILA regime, suggesting that the current law lacks a consistent and coherent principle. Parts V and VI then propose a set of extreme alternative approaches, and several intermediate approaches on how TILA might deal with optional charges, and analyze how those approaches lack economic integrity. Finally, Part VII suggests a different approach that builds on accepted economic premises and characterizes charges as finance charges only when they compensate the creditor for one of the four recognized components of the cost of credit-origination, servicing, funding, and risk. Recognition of this principle, the authors suggest, can be accomplished, without amendments to TILA or Regulation Z, by amendments to the Official Staff Commentary

Tissue phantoms in multicenter clinical trials for diffuse optical technologies

Tissue simulating phantoms are an important part of instrumentation validation, standardization/training and clinical translation. Properly used, phantoms form the backbone of sound quality control procedures. We describe the development and testing of a series of optically turbid phantoms used in a multi-center American College of Radiology Imaging Network (ACRIN) clinical trial of Diffuse Optical Spectroscopic Imaging (DOSI). The ACRIN trial is designed to measure the response of breast tumors to neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Phantom measurements are used to determine absolute instrument response functions during each measurement session and assess both long and short-term operator and instrument reliability