Credit in chaos

Credit-card companies are afraid. After decades of encouraging customers to "buy now, worry about paying us later," they're now the ones who are worried. Among their major worries is whether they'll ever be repaid.

Gail Cunningham, spokeswoman for the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, says card issuers are examining everything that might be chancy about each customer. "Even an unused credit card represents risk," Cunningham says. "You might have a $5,000 credit line, and in theory, overnight you could run the [available] balance down and become a risk."

Credit-card companies are staggering under the weight of years of excessive credit limits and consumer defaults. What's more, they're facing substantial changes in the form of new federal regulations.

Last December, the Federal Reserve Board, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the National Credit Union Administration issued rules that prohibit some, but not all, of the devious practices that credit-card companies regularly employ. The rules won't start until July 2010, although some members of Congress have threatened to pass a "bill of rights" for credit-card consumers sooner.