Yes, you can get this children's book: This is Russell: Russell is a Republican. And there's a Democrat and an Independent in the book, too. And for the cat-lovers you can rejoice because Russell is a cat....

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CitiBank announced last week that they have notified 7% of their customers that their credit cards will soon be canceled because they are "high risk customers." You can read about this story here. You will also learn that you might be one of those customers, especially if you are an infrequent user of your credit card and you pay your balance off each month.

Yes, CitiBank has decided to weed out some customers who aren't particularly profitable for the bank. Peter Birks has the right idea, imho:

"A "bad risk" is a bad risk. That a 20-year-old bad risk might become a desired 35-year-old customer and therefore deserves nurturing, is just not something a bank will think about -- mainly because no private institution ever looks 15 years ahead any more. Lloyds is a bit of a basket case at the moment. Many of the reasons for that are a legacy of the short-term actions senior executives at the bank took 15 years ago (which were doubtless supported by the BBA then). Banks like Citigroup are making the same mistake today. They just see a snapshot, not the bigger picture.

Sell."

I also think that the dropping customers who pay off their cards each month is a recipe for a problem. If you had a credit card with CitiBank and you got one of those letters, would you keep your other accounts with CitiBank? Hell no. Might you tell your friends about the bad service at CitiBank? Hell yes. It only takes a few seconds to lose a customer. CitiBank is trying hard to lose a lot of customers, and I think they'll succeed to a tremendous extent.