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The average American family has eight. Credit cards, plastic money, has become both a necessity and a ticket to a better life. Credit card is an extraordinary, unbelievably great convenience for the consumer. But the credit industry plays by it's own rules. I don't know any merchant that in America who can change the price after you bought the item except Credit Company. Credit card banks earn record profits and be an A's profits last year. One and a half times at we've done. But the profits come out of a price. Now they've raised my rate at 19.98 A. And I'm not at least ever . There are irritated, unhappy, dissatisfied customers in this industry. They are the new launched sharks in American. I certainly did imagine that some day we might have end up creating a franking style. Franking style, what do you mean franking style? Tonight, Frontline correspondent L. at the New York Times, investigate the secrets of your credit cards.

This may seem an unlikely place to begin the modern history of the credit card. More than a thousand miles from Wall Street, on the Paneled halls in the Federal Reserve in Watshinton. But this is where the credit card business first began to really take off.

This is SIOUX FALL south Acoda. A modest town in 140,000, known for its cattle loctions and meet packing industry. It's a town which both is a huge post office, big enough to service the city several times its size. Everyday, millions of pieces of mail pass through here and from here, millions of credit card certifications and bills are send to mail boxes across America. And billions of dollars of credit payments come in from around the world.

Today, Sioux Fall is one of the major credit card processing centers in the country. It all happened in Sious Falls because a quarter of the century ago, times were hard in south Acoda. There was a nation wide recession with double digital inflation. Money was very tight. South Acoda banks were issuing very few mortgages or loans of any kind.

"Interest rates are going in robot; they were climbing all the time." Dugencloce was then the governor in the south Acoba. When I became the governor officier, south Acoda had very tight historic lose and what you could charge to borrow. In other words, There was one interest rate by law that they can charge for new cards, another one for used cards. It was highly regulated what interest rate people could pay. What I'm trying to say is, we may have a lot to say that you can charge 9% but money costs 11%, so based on loaning money. To get the banks to issue loans, south Acoda decided to eliminate historic cash on interest rates, known as a usually law.

"We have actually changed some of our laws in 1979, and we have previously introduced legislation and past legislation so lift the sailing unusually, so we can free up and give capelin in south Acoda. "