AOC And Bernie Join Forces To Take Down Greedy Wall Street Banks

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders have teamed up on legislation that would cap credit card interest rates at 15%, possibly cutting in half the amount of interest that many card holders currently pay. This move has drawn the ire of Republicans and the banking industry, but that isn’t going to slow the momentum on this legislation that would provide relief to millions of Americans. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

On Thursday it was announced that representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders had teamed up basically forming a, you know, this political superstar team. They've teamed up and come up with legislation to take down Wall Street greed. Specifically. This legislation is going to cap credit card interest rates at 15% and among other things it would also help lay the foundation to create postal banking here in the United States. And it's that second part actually the postal banking thing that is drawing a lot of criticism from Republicans. Now I'm going to get to that in just a moment, but let's talk about the credit card interest rate problem we have in the United States today. Currently there is $1 trillion in credit card debt held among American citizens. You have a, we actually, the banking industry brought in 113 billion in interest and fees from credit cards just last year, which is up 35% from 2012 the 15% cap would actually be the same as the one congress imposed on credit unions in 1980 so this is not without precedent.

It is something Congress has done before and can do again. But when we have banks lending out, credit cards are these financial institutions, capital one chase, Bank of America, Mastercard, whoever they are, they're making over a hundred billion dollars a year just on the interest, then yes, something's wrong. And I know that's a huge source of profits for them. And banks have to make money to stay in business, but consider this rates have been rising fastest for those with lowest credit scores here in the United States. Right now, the median interest rate is currently 21.36% as of last week. Um, but for borrowers with high credit scores, the average rate is 17.73% but a year ago that was actually 16.71% so we've gone up a full percentage point for people with great credit in the last 12 months. For those with poor credit scores, the average is now 24.99% whereas it was 23.77% just one year ago.

Interest rates are climbing astronomically even for people with good credit, and they want to cap this at 15% which is actually well below the average interest rate for people with awesome credit. So this is something it's actually going to help everybody. You know, even people with a lot of money, people who make decent money. This isn't just all we're giving a handout to the port. No, this is, we're going to help everyone across the board because that's what we do as a country. Yes, it's going to benefit low income people, people with bad credit scores a little bit more. But everybody deserves this. And you know why Bernie Sanders pointed this out because just a years ago, we handed those banks billions upon billions of our tax dollars to help them stay afloat. And now it's time that they help us average American citizens stay afloat. That's what needs to happen. It's time for them to reciprocate. Oh, we did everything they wanted for so long. Well, guess what?

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