Swipe, Then Settle

In September 1958, sixty thousand unsolicited credit cards landed in Fresno mailboxes with no application and no credit check, each one a three-hundred-dollar experiment. Swipe, Then Settle opens with Joe Williams, the Bank of America executive who built that so-called Fresno Drop and lost his job within a year, long before the system he invented became the one every bank now runs.
The book explains what made that card different from the Diners Club cards before it: a revolving line of credit that let people pay a sliver of the bill and carry the rest, charged eighteen percent annual interest, with no fixed end date. It uses the 2013 Target breach, which exposed forty million card numbers, to show why a stolen credit card costs the bank money while a stolen debit card drains a shoppers own checking account for weeks.
Drawing on a large retailers fight over swipe fees, it argues every cash shopper quietly subsidizes every rewards-card shoppers free flights, and shows exactly how to collect those same rewards without ever paying interest.
Discover the one autopay setting, Statement Balance instead of Minimum Payment, that turns a credit card from a debt trap into a thirty-day interest-free loan.