Last May, members of Congress and many consumer advocates were hailing the new credit card reform law as a great boon for consumers.

I didn’t share the exuberance, as I wrote at the time. 

Six months later, it’s clear that Congress rolled over for the financial industry on key points.

The new law doesn’t address the most serious abuses of the greed-driven credit card companies – there’s no cap on interest rates, for example.

Worse, it opened up a loophole that let the pigs run wild for another nine months: Congress wrote the bill so that it takes effect next year but left Americans defenseless to all sorts of shenanigans by the credit card companies until then.