Citigroup, for instance, recently sent letters to many of its Citi Card customers informing them of a new annual fee of $60. The only way to avoid that fee, the letter says, is to either spend more than $2,400 each year, after which the fee would be credited back to cardholders, or to pay off your debts and close the account. A Citigroup spokesman said the fee was “necessary given the increasing costs of doing business.” The message, of course, is simple: Spend more money through the bank, which in turn increases the likelihood Citigroup will collect late fees and other charges, or take your business elsewhere. As one Citi Card holder told Mother Jones, “What they’re doing is getting rid of prudent customers.”

And that’s just one example of what banks and credit card companies are up to in reaction to legislation like the Credit CARD Act. According to IndexCreditCards.com, a comprehensive site with data on credit card offerings, interest rates for consumers jumped by 0.42 percentage points in the past month, and the average rate offered to new customers, 16.7 percent, is the highest since 2005, with rates for both reward and non-reward cards continuing to climb. “We’re clearly seeing one of the unintended consequences of the new law,” IndexCreditCards.com founder Adam Jusko said in a statement. “We seem to be going from a marketplace in which a relatively few cardholders got into deep trouble to one in which the misery is more evenly spread.”

What consumer advocates hope, however, is that the savings from the CARD Act will outweigh the banking industry’s efforts to pass costs along to consumers. By cutting retroactive rate increases and “hair-trigger” penalty interest rates, the CARD Act could save consumers more than $10 billion a year, according to the Pew Charitable Trust’s Safe Credit Cards Project. Pew also is pushing for an overhaul of late fees charged to cardholders, which the organization says are far too excessive right now. “We are seeing instances where Americans are being charged excessive penalties for exceeding their credit limits by even one dollar,” Nick Bourke, the head of the Safe Credit Cards Project, said recently. “A $39 fee for exceeding a credit limit by just a few dollars, or for missing a $70 minimum payment deadline by a few hours, is difficult to justify as ‘reasonable’ or ‘proportional’ under the factors identified in the new law.”

In late August, the Federal Reserve will issue a definition of what “reasonable and proportional” penalties for credit cards should be, which will be the third and final phase of the CARD Act. “We encourage regulators to implement strong rules that directly address disproportionate penalties,” says Pew’s Bourke.

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The issue lies within the number of people who have been jobless for an extended period of time. Long-term delinquencies remain high because of this while the number of freshly unemployed people is declining, bringing the number of early delinquencies down.

Despite all the government programs and initiatives to aid with the housing crisis, we are still seeing foreclosures on the rise. In my opinion the tax credits were a way to sugarcoat the huge problem and they are slated to end Q2 of this year when I fear there will be another drop in home values and more foreclosures to come. The focus needs to be on thinking outside the box and creating something that will shake up our economy.

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We all know the huge influx of smartphones into the market during the past two years with Apple, HTC, Nokia, Samsung and Motorola all doing everything they can to take advantage of the huge opportunity this sector offers. However, as the original smartphone maker and still the choice of most corporations mainly due to its enterprise e-mail servers and reliability, Blackberry will continue to be an icon for years to come. Carriers also love Blackberrys due to the fact that it consumes far less bandwidth than other smartphones. “Network operators can support three BlackBerry browsing sessions for every one other smart phone browsing session,” Lazaridis says.

thebroker’s take: I think following earnings season and some great new features being released in the coming months, RIMM will fill its long-standing gap and possibly get into the high 80s, possibly into the low 90s over the next two months. You’ll see.

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