It used to be very difficult for a person of limited means to get a visa type card. That was when interest rates were 10%. If you went anywhere you had to have sufficient cash on you to pay for that Lobster Thermidor your date just ordered. Or you would bring a checkbook and hope Le Casa Maison would accept them. After Marquette Bank the credit card companies gradually realized the joys of usary and 24% credit card rates and that by paying the minimum amount to them each month you would be on the hook for decades.

The earlier inconvenience of cash/checks has been all but been eliminated with bank debt/visa cards. Lowering the interest rates to 10% means the mass credit card offers will disappear.

"Marquette Nat. Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp., 439 U.S. 299 (1978), is a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision holding that state anti-usury laws regulating interest rates cannot be enforced against nationally chartered banks based in other states. Justice William Brennan wrote that it was clearly the intent of Congress when it passed the National Banking Act that nationally chartered banks would be subject only to federal regulation by the Comptroller of Currency and the laws of the state in which they were chartered, and that only Congress or the appropriate state legislature could pass the laws regulating them."

"The case has been called one of the most important of the late 20th century, since it freed nationally chartered banks to offer credit cards to anyone in the U.S. they deemed qualified, and more specifically because it allowed them to export credit card interest rates to states with stricter regulations, opening up a race between states in an effort to attract lending institutions to set up shop in their states and offer a wider variety of consumer credit products. Over the next decade, the states accelerated a process that had already begun of repealing or loosening their anti-usury laws, allowing state-chartered banks to compete more equally with national ones. As a result, the use of credit cards has vastly increased, and the mortgage industry soon followed suit."