Edward Yingling may not look like your typical magician. An older gentlemen with a serious face, it is hard to imagine him with a top hat, cape, and fake flowers. But while he may not be able to pull a rabbit out of his hat, he’s the primary lobbyist for an industry that is remarkably good at making peoples’ money disappear. And after being quoted in a recent New York Times article, he is certainly in the spotlight.

The comments that have put Yingling on center stage were made in reaction to the passing of the Credit Card Reform bill, which has the potential to outlaw some of the tricks credit card companies have used to cheat money from their customers. As CEO of the American Banking Association, Yingling is the chief lobbyist in Washington for banks, and the most vocal mouthpiece for the banking industries response to a bill that is meant to limit the ability of credit card companies to use deceptive practices.

Like a magician who believes that a good trick should never be explained, Yingling seems to be arguing that if credit card companies reveal the methods they use to keep people in debt, things like small print and hidden charges, the illusion that lets credit card companies make massive profits will be ruined and the industry right along with it. The big “Ta-Dah” of this magic trick? Yingling says that the real losers in all of this will be those of us who use our credit cards responsibly: “It will be a different business,” he told the New York Times. “Those that manage their credit well will in some degree subsidize those that have credit problems.”

Speaking as a responsible card user, I’m not so sure I mind the end of this particular magic show. Those people I am supposedly “subsidizing” because I have good credit are mainly the people that the credit card company has already sawed in half. After all, they wouldn’t have credit problems if the credit industry hadn’t invited them onstage by promising to show them a good time, then proceeded to introduce them to the business side of a dull knife.

In some ways, Yingling’s statement is an odd one for a professional trickster to make. He seems to be suggesting that credit card companies are the greatest possible meritocracy, and that only the stupid will end up with credit problems.  He now threatens those who “haven’t been foolish” that they will pay for those who are.

This seems strangely out of touch with reality. After all, even after adjusting for inflation, credit card companies managed to grow the debt industry from a mean of $3,000 dollars of credit card debt per family in 1989 into an average of $7,300 of family credit card debt in 2007. So either Yingling believes that the vast majority of Americans are simpletons that deserve to have bad credit, or he admits that the tricks that his industry used to create the credit illusion were so good that even the wise were duped.

The tricks that the Senate bill will no longer allow into the act seem fairly basic. If passed into law, credit card companies will no longer by allowed to simply change the rate on existing debt, unless the account is seriously delinquent. They won’t be able to apply payments to new charges first, change terms without notifying customers well in advance, or charge over-limit fees without asking. In short, some of the more obvious and blatant tricks will have been cut out of the magic show. But they can still charge up to 30% interest, levy any number of fees, and change rates regularly as long as they don’t change them in the first six months of your account.

But for Yingling, the magic may simply be gone. After all, he represents an industry for whom the primary result of the magic show is a metric for success that most people have never heard of: Shareholder Value Added. SVA is a measurement that is primarily designed to guarantee that stock holders make money. And since 80% of stocks are owned by the top 20% of the richest people in the United States, SVA basically means that credit card companies believe that the good tricks are defined by how much more money they make for rich people. The audience, those most injured by the tricks, are notoriously absent: the metric is not number of people served, or problems solved, or financial services rendered.

The New York Times interview is not the first that Yingling has revealed the secrets behind the credit card illusion. In a 2004 interview with PBS, he confirmed that the best customers credit card companies have are the ones that get in debt and stay in debt, referring to them as “the sweet spot,”and noted that only a lawyer would actually read the contract that is sent to someone with their credit card. And even if they did, he continues, it “would be very hard for a lot of people to understand.”

So what will happen to the credit card industry if Congress deprives them of some of their old tricks? By noting that revealing the source of the illusion will forever change the face of the industry, Yingling admits that these tricks are what the credit card industry was built on. Credit card companies needed people to be fooled in order to continue to increase the SVA and rake in massive profits.

Arguably, however, if showing the fine print breaks your business, your business was already broken. Long before Congress even considered the current credit card reform bill, Yingling himself noted that “it would be shortsighted for a credit card company to have fees that would make somebody angry, because they’re likely to lose that customer.” Now that the tricks are slowly being revealed, it may be that the credit card industry has to face the ultimate test of a magician: with the illusion revealed and the show over, what will they do to keep the audience entertained?