It's too bad the Fed is giving issuers so much time to comply with rules that should have been adopted years ago," said MSN Money columnist Liz Pulliam Weston, the author of three books about credit and debt.

She said credit card issuers shot themselves in the foot this year by making blanket, arbitrary changes to the accounts of some of their best customers. Issuers doubled and tripled interest rates and chopped lines of credit not just to high-risk borrowers, but to people who always paid on time and who had good credit.

"Their actions just brought home to millions of consumers how capricious and unfair the credit card industry had become," Weston said.

The changes could cost the banking industry more than $10 billion a year in interest payments, according to a study by law firm Morrison & Foerster.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com...ard-rules.aspx