Is it me or has the world gone mad? I remember my history teacher telling me that you have to study history – "it's like studying the future. Everything is always replayed," he used to say.

He also used to bang on about the Americans invading our precious traditions, and their empire building. Which of course, we taught 'em.

Which digression brings me to online banking outfit egg, and its recent delisting of customers it deemed to have poor credit. Since it chucked 161,000 customers off its register, it has been revealed that a "substantial amount" of those customers are, in fact, in possession of good credit ratings. And no one was safe from the exodus: even a city worker who earned £1m last year and owns £100,000 in Citibank shares – Citibank is the parent company of egg – received the dreaded letter of poor credit.

Labour MP Nigel Griffiths, former consumer affairs minister, is to meet with the egg chief executive Ian Kerr to find out why they're culling such vast numbers of clients so suddenly. Griffiths has also asked the Office of Fair Trading to investigate complaints made by these so-called poor creditors.

Then, against all the apparent teaching of history that if one pays one's bills on time, one should not come into trouble with one's creditors, Treasury Select Committee chairman John McFall suggested that credit card firms might be withdrawing accounts from people who pay their bills on time. Some say this is because they can't make enough money from good customers, and can make a harder, faster quid from higher rates paid (eventually, or ever) by bad debtors.

If this is true, and egg and other credit card companies are blacklisting good customers in the hopes of making more money off the bad payers, I find it highly entertaining – or is it more terrifying? - that this can be allowed to continue.

Have we not yet learned the lesson from our US counterparts the potential fallout from lending to riskier clients who might not be able to pay you back, who can even file for bankruptcy at last resort - meaning unpaid debts will never see the light of day? What will happen, then, if all the bad debtors are given higher limits on their credit cards by rival providers? And what would then happen in the credit markets if all these borrowers can't keep up repayments? What will UK lenders do with all the debt they have bought and cannot sell on?

Either I was wrong in cussing my teacher's assessment that we replay the same mistakes again and again in spite of the lessons of history - or the credit card companies have got Alzheimer's.