MPC Hill Blast: Your Favorite Restaurant is in Trouble
The top three restaurant costs are food, labor, and credit card swipe fees. and in the last 4 years food is up 29%, labor 31% and swipe fees 70%.
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MPC Hill Blast: The Profiteers
No matter what you think about tariffs, one thing is clear: the credit card industry will take its huge cut on every dollar of tariffs they can that make it into consumer prices and will create upward pressure on the prices of virtually everything Americans buy.
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MPC Hill Blast: Record Debt, Record Fees
Americans’ credit card debt has hit a new record: $1.21 Trillion! And, that’s at a time when the average credit card interest rate is 24.21%. So, if credit card debt and interest stayed at those levels this year, the Wall Street banks and other issuers of credit cards would be in line to make . . . $292.941 billion in interest this year.
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MPC Hill Blast: Justice Departments Under Democratic and Republican Administrations Have Condemned Visa’s Monopolization of the Market
The Justice Department recently filed a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Visa. The complaint alleges that Visa has been monopolizing the debit card market, paying rivals not to innovate or compete with them, and extracting fees that inflate prices of “nearly everything.”
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MPC Hill Blast: 'Visa Wanted a Vast Empire. First, it had to beat back its foes.' – WSJ
On October 19th, the Wall Street Journal published an expose on how Visa used its market power to block competition in the credit card market. The findings are eye-opening and, along with the recent Department of Justice lawsuit against Visa, add to the growing evidence of the lack of a free market in the space.
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MPC Hill Blast: The DOJ has sued Visa for antitrust law violations on debit cards
The Department of Justice has sued Visa for antitrust law violations on debit cards.
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MPC Hill Blast: Hotel Owners Know Competition Will Improve Credit Cards
Check out this article from Laura Lee Blake, President and CEO of the Asian American Hotel Owners Association whose 20,000 members own 60 percent of U.S. hotels.
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MPC Hill Blast: Facts Get in the Way
The giant Wall Street Banks fund a lot of groups. One of them is the Bank Policy Institute (whose Board includes the CEOs of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi, and Wells Fargo, among others).
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MPC Hill Blast: The Rest of the Story
With a nod to the late Paul Harvey, The Capitol Forum has given us the hidden background on the big banks’ misdirection on credit card rewards.
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MPC Hill Blast: Major IT Outages Ground Flights, Hits Banks and Businesses Worldwide
As everyone learned, and many experienced first-hand, last week a flawed update from the cybersecurity software firm Crowdstrike disrupted operations at companies of all kinds throughout much of the world.
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