What's in Your Wally? Credit Card Plundering and Pillaging

Watching my hometown college football team streaming on my computer this past weekend, I was subjected to a credit card commercial too many times to count.

You may have seen the commercial. It's one in a series of 11th century Norsemen (sometimes called Vikings) attempting to assimilate in modern culture. The commercials are funny. They are entertaining.

Then you ask yourself the question, what do Norsemen have to do with credit cards? The commercials all end with a catch phrase designed to get you to put one of their credit cards in your wallet.

So, I'm supposed to use your credit card because you have entertaining commercials? Is that how it works?

I would have stopped thinking about the commercials except for a seminary professor who told me about a BBC documentary on the melding of Freudian psychological theories with Madison Avenue. Most commercial campaigns after the 1940s have a strong psychological component designed to get us to buy products we don't need with money we don't have.

What are Norseman known for? Pillaging and plundering. They did a lot more, but most of what they did has not entered the cultural psyche. The pillaging and plundering is part of our cultural psyche.

My theory is the commercials are designed to get us to feel good about being pillaged and plundered. They are such friendly, funny Norsemen, aren't they?

Let's look at the math involved in the credit card plundering.

The standard credit card for this company has a 24.9 interest rate and $19 annual fee.

The card for young adults has a 19.8 interest rate and $39 annual fee.

The lowest rate is for the Prestige card, ostensibly not everyone has enough prestige to get this one, with an 11.9 percent rate and no annual fee.

Let's compare this with the amount of money you would receive for depositing money in their bank.

The rates range from 1.1 percent to 1.75 percent. Let's put this in simple terms. When you use a credit card, you are borrowing money. To do this, if you borrow $100 you will pay $120 with 20 percent rate.

If you save at this bank, at 1.5 percent, you will earn $1.50 from $100. The difference, called profit, between $20 and $1.5 is $18.5. In other words, when you give the bank $100 they give you a buck and half and they make eighteen and half dollars when they loan your money to some one else.

That, in other times, was called plundering. Your wallet has been pillaged. Today, we call it funny and entertaining. Banks and credit card companies spend billions of dollars mounting campaigns designed to pillage and plunder the wealth of working people.

Have they succeeded? Who cares, they're such funny commercials.