Well, what I am saying is that they have to some extent conflicting objectives, or at least conflicting interests. They don't want lots of consumers getting seriously into debt and then not being able to pay off their debts that they accumulate on credit cards, or any other financial instrument for that matter.
On the other hand, because credit cards have such abnormally high interest rates, they are a very profitable product line for banks, and so I guess the perfect world for them might be that they have lots of indebtedness but no one is really going to the wall just yet.
That's not clearly in the interests of consumers. The problem with credit cards and perhaps newer payment or credit mechanisms is that they're engaged in accumulating debt that's not structured in a way to give them pause. That's why we've recommended in our paper that we need a much more proactive set of policies and processes for consumers who are running into financial difficulty or have payment histories or debt accumulation histories that indicate that they may be in trouble at some point in the future. The bank should be intervening and helping those people get to lower cost credit instruments, and should also be using automatic kinds of nudges, as they're called in the business, to encourage consumers not to pay part of the monthly bill but to pay it all to the extent they possibly can.
Right now, for example, if you get a bill from the bank, you will get a notice saying, in very fine print, that if you do the minimum payment this month, it will take you, say, many years to pay off the debt, but it's lost in the paperwork. We need more effective things like that that would alert consumers to the fact that they are engaged in problematic activity and if they don't change their practices, they will end up in serious difficulty.
However, right now that one little piece of behavioural economics that's in billing is lost for most people. It's not noticeable.