Good luck complaining about your bank.(View point)

Elizabeth and Alan Green of San Diego thought the 2.99 percent interest rate on a new credit card sounded great, so they transferred the balance from an older credit card. They knew they'd have to pay a balance-transfer fee of 3 percent. But they didn't know that the fee would be treated as a purchase and charged an interest rate of 16.74 percent.

Alan Green sought help.The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which oversees national banks, acknowledged his complaint promptly. But it was four months before the Greens got a letter from the agency stating,"It appears the issues have been appropriately addressed."

The OCC hadn't done much for the Greens. It checked with their bank and then repeated what the couple had discovered: that the fine print in the contract noted the higher interest rate. The OCC also said that it couldn't intercede in a dispute over a contract with a bank and that current regulations gave consumers sufficient information to make informed credit decisions.

Alan Green, a mortgage officer with an M.B.A., disagrees. "They got me by the fine print," he says. "If they got me, how about so many other people?"

Consumers Union questions the effectiveness of an agency that dismisses a consumer's problem just because it involves a contract. People won't waste time alerting regulatory agencies to flaws in the marketplace if they risk getting no more than a letter saying, in effect, "We ...