281–290 of 547 posts
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> In an inflationary environment the status quo is that your wages shrink. The US is a classical inflationary environment and wages have kept pace with inflation forever. Indeed, inflation only, and intentionally, punishes those who hoard cash.
Not always, depending on your timeframe. eg. if you look at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/United_S... there’s about 2 decades where the real wage went down.
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> In an inflationary environment the status quo is that your wages shrink. The US is a classical inflationary environment and wages have kept pace with inflation forever. Indeed, inflation only, and intentionally, punishes those who hoard cash.
Not always, depending on your timeframe. eg. if you look at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/United_S... there’s about 2 decades where the real wage went down.
I would note that chart begins prior to ending the gold standard in 1971, and it has tracked very well since 1995.
I was off-base when I said "forever." I should have said in recent history.
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Interchange fee pricing is set based on how much MasterCard charges the bank That’s not true though, or at least is a massive oversimplification. In the US, interchange fees are extremely inflated to allow banks to recuperate the rewards they give out to distinguish their card offerings from one another. The 2% cashback has to come from somewhere.
>In the US, interchange fees are extremely inflated to allow banks to recuperate the rewards they give out to distinguish their card offerings from one another. The 2% cashback has to come from somewhere. And that's a bad thing, because it's essentially the poor subsidizing the rich. People who aren't able to get credit cards (or the "good" cash back credit cards) tend to be worse off financially than people who do.
Instead of 2% cash back for some, they could just add 20 percentage points or so to the interest rates of everyone else. If you think this is unfair, you're really just saying that interest rates are applied unfairly. But it doesn't sound like that's your actual thought process. Is everyone who pays higher rates subsidizing those who pay lower? How do you know?
*This is not my original idea, but something I read somewhere.
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>In the US, interchange fees are extremely inflated to allow banks to recuperate the rewards they give out to distinguish their card offerings from one another. The 2% cashback has to come from somewhere. And that's a bad thing, because it's essentially the poor subsidizing the rich. People who aren't able to get credit cards (or the "good" cash back credit cards) tend to be worse off financially than people who do.
This has always struck me as one of the more blatant and out-in-the-open financial inequalities in this country.
Stores need to accept cash regardless, so there’s still some minimal added costs to using cash, but even with the offered discount it’s less than the credit cards...
however if stores stopped accepting credit cards they would quickly find themselves drowning in the same costs that credit cards were invented to avoid.
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CC rewards seem like a indirect regressive tax. Wealthier consumers who can afford to pay on time and have better credit ratings are subsidized by poor consumers who actually use the "credit" part of "credit card".
And, you would be correct, in a sense. Wealthier consumers benefit disproportionately from CC rewards compared to less wealthy consumers: Paper from 2010 showing this: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1652260 News article with a good summary: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-wealthtransfer/cr...
tldr: >> ...the lowest-income household ($20,000 or less annually) pays $21 and the highest-income household ($150,000 or more annually) receives $750 every year.
I feel like card competition is actually pretty steep. MasterCard and Visa may have the majority of the market, but there are still Discover and AmEx. I have been using things like NerdWallet to figure out what is the best card to go with, it is usually a healthy balance. I think the main thing is that most Debit cards are Visa or MasterCard...and you are locked in by your bank. Where as credit & charge cards are a f…
When customer clicks “Checkout”, they are sent to payment processor website to enter card number like 1234 ...5678... and whichever card it is, it goes through, and shop owner receive the payment later.
Which means payment processor has contracts and connects with every card networks, absorb API differences, and on top of that, obeys and agrees to everything CC network thinks or says, to be able to handle any cards customers may have with them.
So if a Visa or MasterCard exec thinks maybe he don’t like Cheetos and make a call to processor CEOs how they think about it, no later than by Friday no one will be able to order a single bag of Cheetos, especially online, using any credit card because payment processors will have explicitly communicated that Cheetos had never been tolerated from the beginning and any store who let that happen will have accounts frozen.
It happens somewhat softer than that but kind of happening once couple years these days.
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This has always struck me as one of the more blatant and out-in-the-open financial inequalities in this country.
It’s also a fake one. As the other commenter said, the credit card system came about bec cash was very expensive to use for stores. They were passing along those costs to consumers, the fact that that’s now inverted by some stores (cash discounts) is only doable bec of the prevalence of credit cards. Stores need to accept cash regardless, so there’s still some minimal added costs to using cash, but even with the offe…
I'm not sure I buy "drowning in the same costs". I think there's something more akin to a prisoner's dilemma here.
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I just want to present a counterpoint to your claim that in the EU, CCs matter less: there are countries in the EU like Sweden where cash is virtually non-existent. Basically everything is card-based here, I've even seen panhandlers who accept electronic payments in Stockholm.
Paying by card is common, paying using a Credit Card not necessarily. I'm French and I'm semi-ashamed to admit that when at a store abroad the clerk asked me "debit or credit?" for payment I had to ask him to explain to me what this quaint exotic incantation meant. When I finally understood how that system worked I also finally understood this weird trope in American movies where a character has a half a dozen credit…
Care to expand on that?
Anyone familiar with the intricacies of these operations know how amenable they are to being debundled into discrete components and provided via an Ethereum-like protocol?
I don't get it -- Amex and Discover are still providing healthy competition, so the "duopoly" the author complains about seems to be largely irrelevant. Competition between cards is thriving and consumers benefit -- witness the miniscule transaction fee the credit card companies keep after paying your rewards back of 2% to 5%, when you pay your bill on time. The article's main point is that such large companies are a…