The Credit Card Competition Act is great for big-box retailers like Target, but it’s extremely harmful for consumers.
American families are struggling through a cost of living crisis. Many are not saving for the future, they are struggling to stay above the water. Currently, over 60 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, up two percentage points from last year. Some families are struggling to afford basic necessities like gas and groceries.
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Ajay Banga, the former CEO of Mastercard that President Joe Biden has nominated to head the World Bank, told Axios Wednesday that both the bank and the private sector needed to spend “trillions” to combat both climate change and poverty.
Banga has been aggressively campaigning for the job, meeting with officials from 37 different governments in the past three weeks, Axios reported. The World Bank faces competing pressure from wealthy and developing countries over whether to focus on combatting climate change or poverty mitigation, but Banga said he does not view the two goals as inherently opposed to one another.
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After last week’s news that American Express, Mastercard and Visa, plan to keep lists of those who purchase weapons using their credit card services, Tennessee’s Attorney General is leading a coalition of 24 of his peers from various states in opposition of that plan.
“Giant financial companies must not use their combined market power to circumvent our
representative democracy,” said Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti. “As Attorney
General, I protect the people of Tennessee from corporate collusion that threatens to undermine their constitutional rights. Working together with my colleagues from other states, we will marshal the full scope of our lawful authority to stop this abuse.”
by Kyle Perisic Google and Mastercard have reportedly struck a secret deal to monitor users’ in-store purchases, to collect data on what Google ads have resulted in purchases. After years of negotiations, Google paid Mastercard millions of dollars for its customer data, Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing two anonymous sources. The two could be sharing ad revenue, Bloomberg added but also reported a Google spokeswoman denied that claim. “People don’t expect what they buy physically in a store to be linked to what they are buying online,” said advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Christine Bannan. “There’s just far too much burden that companies place on consumers and not enough responsibility being taken by companies to inform users what they’re doing and what rights they have.” Knowing which ads have resulted in purchases would make targeted ads — specialized ads tailored to specific individuals — much more valuable. Thus far, it has been almost impossible to tell if an online ad has resulted in a purchase. “Before we launched this beta product last year, we built a new, double-blind encryption technology that prevents both Google and our partners from viewing our respective users’ personally identifiable information,” Google said in a statement, according to Bloomberg.…
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