Credit Cards News

LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) -- Imagine whipping out your wallet to charge a $5,000 big-screen TV using a low-rate credit card, and then later finding that your rate had jumped to a whopping 24%. MARKETWATCH PERSONAL FINANCE  IN INVESTING A primer on buying foreign stocks through pink sheets  IN MUTUAL FUNDS Vanguard plans new small-cap fund, shuffles managers  IN LIFE ...

By Pete Harrison LONDON (Reuters) - The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has launched a new investigation into credit card association MasterCard and suspects that it has infringed the Competition Act, the watchdog body said on Thursday. The OFT probe follows one last year which concluded that fees charged by MasterCard UK's members, including most major banks, were anti-competitive and pushed up re ...

Interest rates quoted by credit card companies can often mislead people, consumer group Which? has said. Which? said the 14 different methods used by lenders to calculate interest charges make it hard for consumers to tell which credit card is cheapest. The consumer group called for a single method of calculation to be adopted. "It's ludicrous that a card with a lower interest rate can cost more than one with a higher rate," Martin Coles, editor of Which? magazine, said. As an example of th ...

By Madeline Thomas LONDON (Reuters) - Credit card providers disguise their charges to such an extent that consumers find it impossible to work out which card is the cheapest, consumer body Which? said on Thursday. Which? said its own research showed cards with higher annual percentage rates (APRs) could be cheaper than those with more competitive rates depending on how many days' interest they applied. While many cards applied interest from the date of purchase, others waited a few days and o ...

It is almost impossible to compare UK credit card deals, Which? has said. This is because the country's credit card firms use a series of different systems to calculate how interest is charged on their cards, making comparison of headline interest rates almost meaningless. Which? points to calculations showing that the Cahoot credit card rate of 11.8 per cent could end up costing more than HSBC' ...

Britons are planning to engage in a little plastic surgery, and cut credit card spending in the next three months to shed their festive pounds. The latest figures from the Morgan Stanley credit card index show that UK residents expect to spend £645 on their plastic in the coming months, 31 per cent less than the £940 they thought they would spend in the last three months of 2005. While a fall in ...