I believe in freedom of contract, but I also believe in fair business practices. Credit card companies have a lot of incentive to craft agreements that look OK

I believe in freedom of contract, but I also believe in fair business practices. Credit card companies have a lot of incentive to craft agreements that look OK on the surface but are littered with land mines. They are the ones that craft the (not) clearly stated policies, and I suspect they've tuned the agreements to maximize profits from slip-ups and timing. Case in point: sending APR change notices, setting effective APR change dates, and requiring written responses all within one billing cycle. It's not obvious that a line in the original agreement leads to retroactive billing at arbitrary APR if a written response wasn't received. The written response requirement was only mentioned in small print at the end of a large amended agreement. You said "Free of regulation, markets will choose the firms that provide the highest value to customers." That may be true of efficient markets, but I don't think there's nearly enough transparency in the credit card market. I'm for regulations that prevents excessive interest rate hikes for no cause coupled with insufficient grace periods to reject the rates and close out the account. We had used the cash advance to bypass a liquidity issue with other assets, so when sufficiently motivated, we were able to payoff the sizable advance within two weeks after talking with Advanta reps. Even then, we were hit with these elevated charges. Lesson learned.