[ggggtez]

You don't want to loan money to people who go broke. That's the thing credit card companies want to avoid the most. The whole point of the credit system is to prove that you are someone who pays back their debts.

In this case, likely many otherwise reasonable people are all suddenly making bad investments before their credit history can catch up to it. The CC company wants to avoid that risk, and so bans that type of purchase to get ahead of it.

[DougWebb]

Actually they couldn't care less if their customers go broke; it happens all the time. They just want their customers to take a long time to go broke, to make lots of charges (transaction fees), and to carry large balances (interest fees). When they're sure you're broke and they can't extract any more fees from you, they'll close your account and charge it off to a debt collector.

[gowld]

John Maynard Keynes almost said, "In the long run, we're all broke."