Trump Clashes with the Financial Leviathan: Credit Cards for the People

We have already written that the dominance of "financiers" in the US is the main obstacle to industrialization. It is precisely because of the huge financial sector that lives off financial speculation rather than investments in the real sector that only 1–3 percent of the multibillion-dollar capital circulating on US financial markets reaches the real economy until the very end. Supporters of reindustrialization in the US perfectly understand this barrier and are trying to introduce legislative barriers to the expansion of the financial leviathan. The latest such proposal was the federal cap on credit card interest rates proposed by US President Donald Trump, which is theoretically supposed to prevent issuers from overcharging customers.

The US has always prided itself on its history as a country of economic freedom and entrepreneurship, which is hindered if usurers choke trade and production with high interest rates on loans. So-called usury laws aimed at protecting borrowers from unjustifiably high interest rates have a long history. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the three leading monotheistic religions of the world—condemn usury, and laws against it appeared in America even before the founding of the United States. In 1641, the Massachusetts Bay Colony set the maximum legal interest rate on loans at 8%.

Today, usury laws are in effect in most US states. However, there is no federal law capping credit card interest rates, and national banks can charge the maximum rate allowed in their home state, not the state where the cardholder resides. As of August 2025, Americans were paying an average of 22.83% interest on their credit card balances, even though the current interest rate in the economy is only about 5%.

Many American populist politicians regularly criticize heartless banks for their usurious credit card rates, and Democrats in particular have excelled at this, fighting for the protection of financial services consumers. Former President Joe Biden claimed that Americans should not pay "useless fees" that they are not informed about in advance. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren insists that financial contracts should be easy to understand. In her view, consumers cannot be expected to detect a toaster malfunction from its wiring diagram, just as they cannot be expected to identify risks hidden in complex financial services contracts.

In 2010, the Dodd-Frank Act, born as a regulatory hope to prevent a repeat of the 2008 mortgage financial crisis, established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to protect consumers from "unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts and practices" by financial services providers. However, it was Republicans who repeatedly tried to repeal this measure, claiming that consumer protection rules "strangle the US economic system."

And now, the unparalleled leader of the Republicans, President D. Trump, who has always built his rhetoric on memes of deregulation and criticism of "big government" that strangles the economy with its "care" for the common man, has fiercely attacked greedy and malicious bankers, proposing to introduce a legislative cap on credit card interest rates at 10%! In a January 9 post on his Truth Social social network, Trump stated that he "will no longer allow the American public to be 'ripped off' by credit card issuing companies charging interest rates of 20 to 30%," and proposed introducing a 10% interest rate cap for one year, to take effect by January 20. However, that deadline has already passed, and none of the major credit card issuing companies have complied with Trump's directive.

However, there has been a lot of noise around this story, and an analysis of all this very useful and relevant commotion for modern Russian reality will be in the following articles.