Question Why are credit cards still unsecured (not about "secured" cards)?

[randian]

Since the 2005 bankruptcy act severely limited the ability of debtors to avoid liens in chapter 7, including most notably those on motor vehicles and moderately expensive jewelry, I'm surprised that revised terms of service don't lien each and every piece of personal property you own. Pre-2005 rules were intended to restrict things like buying a sofa and finding everything in your house liened. Post-2005 there's no bar to it. While a credit card company may not want to repossess your sofa, as a secured creditor their ability to be a pain in your butt and get painful concessions would be much greater.

[helpme2010]

Since the 2005 bankruptcy act severely limited the ability of debtors to avoid liens in chapter 7, including most notably those on motor vehicles and moderately expensive jewelry, I'm surprised that revised terms of service don't lien each and every piece of personal property you own. Pre-2005 rules were intended to restrict things like buying a sofa and finding everything in your house liened. Post-2005 there's no bar to it. While a credit card company may not want to repossess your sofa, as a secured creditor their ability to be a pain in your butt and get painful concessions would be much greater.

Randian I thought about this a lot as well. I think it strictly comes down to the books. I think it's so much easier for the creditors to simply write off bad debts than it is to collect a portion of the percentage. The exception I think is when a creditor is small and really needs those bad debts in order to survive. e.g. I worked for a small company that would suffer greatly when our customers would not pay their bills, whereas i'm guessing large creditors have so much money, they can simply write it off.

This confuses me when I see stories on this board where some creditors go to great length to get bits and pieces from debtors. I am wondering if they just do this to put some fear in the public to not default or we will do this to you. Or if they do need to collect a percentage of the defaults as they can't write off the entire defaults???