Political Quotes

“Mr. President, a few weeks ago we considered a Wall Street reform bill which tried to address some of the underlying problems in our economy which led to the recession. It was an ambitious undertaking. The Senate Banking Committee, under Chairman Dodd, led us through a very difficult and lengthy debate over the bill. Part of the debate included an amendment which I offered relative to what is known as an interchange fee. An interchange fee is the amount of money charged to a business when a customer presents a credit card. So if I go to a restaurant in Chicago and pay for the bill with a credit card, the restaurant is going to have to pay a percentage of my bill to the credit card company or at least to the issuing bank of the credit card. And then I, of course, have to pay the bill when it comes in the mail. This so-called interchange fee--the charge by the credit card company to the business I am patronizing--is a fee that turns out to be very large and expensive. Nearly $50 billion in credit and debit card interchange fees is collected each year, primarily by the largest credit card companies and by the largest banks that issue those credit cards. This is virtually unregulated. There is no regulation as to the amount charged or collected from these businesses. Visa and MasterCard, which dominate the credit and debit card industries, establish the interchange rates that all merchants and, by extension, their customers pay to banks whenever a card is swiped.…”