[…] Late last week, a federal judge upheld an order blocking a cap on credit card late fees. But the debate over the fees, their usefulness or whether they should exist at all, is far from over. For the moment, though, the move by the CFPB to cap those fees at about $8 through a safe harbor provision, where they’ve most recently been at an industrywide level of about $32, has been stayed by injunction. In the ruling itself, U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman wrote that “the CARD Act explicitly allows card issuers to impose ‘penalty fee[s].’” He added that the CFPB’s Final Rule, however, lowered the fees to $8 for card issuers because it would “cover pre-charge-off collection costs for Large Card Issuers on average…But fees to cover ‘costs’ and fees that constitute ‘penalties’ are not the same thing.” [PYMNTS] […]