The Credit Card Contest Demonstration of 2022 Meets Its Greatest Adversary: Market Rivalry

The Credit Card Contest Demonstration of 2022 Meets Its Greatest Adversary: Market Rivalry

How things have changed. Think about payments.

As Jimmy Soni notes in his excellent 2022 book The Founders (a history of PayPal), “In the late 1990s, only 10 percent of all online commerce was conducted digitally

the present top of mind. U.S. Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL) Roger Marshall (R-KS) introduced the Credit Card Competition Act of 2022

to ensure that giant credit card-issuing banks offer a choice of at least two networks over which an electronic credit transaction may be processed

in the year 2021 alone, Visa V +0.3% and MasterCard (the credit card giants that have drawn the ire of Durbin and Marshall) financed over $3.49 trillion worth of transactions.

$3.49 trillion tells us something bigger about the superfluity of legislation meant to inject more competition into the credit card space.

as AmazonAMZN 0.0% founder Jeff Bezos once put it, “your margin is my opportunity.”

In the real world of commerce, profits always and everywhere attract competition for the same. Amazon looms large here.