Tuesday, November 1, 2011

The Market at Work

According to this morning's Wall Street Journal, B of A will announce today that it'll drop its plan to charge some customers $5 a month for debit card purchases... This follows similar moves by the competition...

No legislation, no new reg, just the market at work... Customers spoke with their feet, Credit Unions grabbed some new business and the big banks decided that hitting their customers in this fashion wasn't in their best interests after all...

Now before you get too excited, understand that legislation did indeed intrude on the marketplace with the Durbin Amendment - which effectively cut (by 50%) the per swipe fee charged to merchants... Costing, they say, the likes of B of A's shareholders, employees and customers some $2 billion a year... Notice I said "shareholders, employees and customers" - that's who pays corporate expenses... Corporations themselves are inanimate objects...

The question now is, how will shareholders, employees and customers share the pain inflicted by the Durbin Amendment? Lower deposit rates, higher loan fees, maybe? I wonder if it (The Durbin Amendment [I stress]) won't ultimately cost the customer more than $5 a month... Hmm...

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