Some historical perspecive: Before the finanical crisis, for quite a few years in a row Citi used to throw 2 x 25k miles out like candy. How is throwing 50k out like candy so much different? Yet back then there was no merger. So why should this round necessarily be related to the merger?

Who knows why they stopped allowing "fast churn" on AA cards in 2009, then started allowing it gradually (first lower bonus cards, then higher bonus cards) within the past year, and now seem to have retrenched only in the past week or so?

Keep in mind that only a tiny fraction of the public (mostly FTers and those on a few other boards) do this "rapid churn" as soon as it's discoverd. To Citi, that's a blip on the radar. Obviously a blip that someone noticed, but it's still a very small fraction of their total customers who are doing this.

(And keep in mind that "rapid churn" on HHonors cards never went away, during the whole time AA "rapid churn" was MIA, but it was an even smaller blip, since way fewer people ever churned the HH cards compared to the AA cards.)

With all that in mind: I think it's more likely that someone made a mistake half a year ago when they internally tagged this 50k Visa offer as "quickly churnble", not realizing that on FT and some other boards that would cause a barrage of churning once discovered. And that, because FTers and other such people are just a "blip", it took (whoever cares at) Citi (and makes decisions about such stuff) half a year to discover it and shut it down!

In any case, all talk about why Citi did this is pure speculation. Citi has never told us why they changed churning policies any time they changed them before, so don't expect them to explain why they changed again now.

However: Don't also assume that everything every CSR says is true. We won't know for some time exactly what the new "rules" are, and in fact we won't know for some time whether they are really blanket rules or simply apply to all the "hot" offers that people are interested now. (I'm still waiting to hear results from people testing the low-bonus cards. All I see is repeated results that 50k isn't working, ok, then, but is 25k working or not? That might be a useful data point. But not one I can provide currently, since I'm stuck at the 4506-T phase in a 50k Visa app I did several weeks ago.)

Btw, I'll offer my own speculation about a totally different factor: How likely is that Citi thought they could put a lid on churning simply by having the $3k in 3 months spend threshold, and that what happened recently is that they figured out how people are using Manufactured Spend for that, and they don't want that, so they've shut it down until they can figure out how to weed out Manfufactured Spend? My theory goes like this: Citi wanted to give big miles only to big spenders, and that's why it raised the threshold to $3k in 3 months. But once they found it was often just Manufactured Spend that was being used to "pretend to be" a big spender, they decided that wasn't the right approach. As a GPS would say, "re-calculating"...