While federal regulations have certainly done their part to help ease the struggles of financially troubled borrowers hoping to avoid bankruptcy and repay their credit card debt burdens as soon as they can while also maintaining their domestic equilibrium, there’s a decisive slipping point at which the legislative bulwarks intended to alleviate consumer distress cede legitimacy to the legal rights that have been guaranteed the lending authorities.
Compared to the free rein granted telemarketing based unsecured
debt collection over much of the 1990s, during which the credit card debt reclamation industry could virtually do whatever the leading corporations deemed financially prudent in an attempt to recover the moneys owed, the ever fiercer restrictions enacted through the past decade’s Congressional guidelines (and the increasing powers of enforcement bestowed upon the agents of the Federal Trade Commission) have without a doubt curbed the unnecessary disturbance of citizen consumers who, after all, are just trying their best to pay back the loans they took out and stabilize their household ledgers.
Nevertheless, the limitations of these statutes have been loudly decried by scholars and pundits worried – with more than a little reason, given the role defaulted credit card debt accounts and foreclosed upon
mortgage equity lines of credit played in the 2006 recession – that the unsecured financial obligations and revolving debt loads of United States households remain the greatest danger to future American prosperity. The current economic situation should warrant heightened governmental focus, but, even if the national legislature (increasingly aligned with business interests as the electoral pendulum veers rightward) abandons the more substantive changes to the Federal Trade Commission that have been threatened, they may yet have sufficient political capital to significantly diminish the monetary resources which give teeth to the strictures.
Even under the present circumstances, the regulatory intricacies do not prima facie grant the consumers of every state the right to file civil suits for compensatory damages after demonstrable harassment stemming from the attempt to collect financial obligations. Without that ever present threat hanging in the balance for over zealous reclamation efforts, many corporations would eagerly risk the negative publicity involved and poor word of mouth for the expected credit card debt windfall eked out from the most desperate and ill prepared consumers, one dollar at a time.
The current barriers against collector persecution have hardly done their job to the satisfaction of most knowledgeable onlookers familiar with the looming consumer finance crisis, and the prospect of the Federal Trade Commission losing even a small percentage of its operating budget to political tactics should horrify any American with even a passing appreciation of the larger credit card debt relief needs swamping the country’s economic viability for the coming century.
Honestly, whatever one believes to be the moral directive of the national legislature in terms of rewarding the recalcitrant borrowers through debt settlement ventures or shaming them to avoid bankruptcy at all cost to their foreseeable family finances, the dimming status of United States Treasury bonds has been a subject of conce
for successive fiscal quarters. With the stock market so perilously perched upon the precipice of collapse and our entire recovery strategy dependent upon the continued global assurance in the health and stability of our currency, ethical dithering must take a back seat to the stabilization of ordinary households for the sake of us all.