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Senate votes to curb credit, debit card fees
WASHINGTON |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Senate approved a measure on Thursday that would let the Federal Reserve regulate debit card fees and help merchants take steps to restrain fees charged by credit card networks to customers every time they use a credit or debit card.
The measure -- which pit retailers and restaurants against banks and card firms such as Visa Inc and MasterCard Inc in a lobbying fight -- was offered as an amendment to a broad Wall Street reform bill by Senator Richard Durbin.
The measure from Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, would let merchants give discounts to customers who use one type of card over another, or who pay by cash or some means other than by card. It would also allow retailers to set minimum purchase levels for using a card.
And it would let the Federal Reserve make the card networks set debit card transaction fees that are "reasonable and proportional to the actual cost incurred."
(Reporting by Kevin Drawbaugh; Editing by Leslie Adler)
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We need to un-elect all those people and keep doing it until they get out of un Constitutional activity.
“Like they did to AIG and GM”. Regulate or bailout? The Bush administration was full of people like Paulson, Cheney, and Bush himself who prided themselves on having run businesses. The GM bailout was pushed by big businesses [ehem, GM is a big business]. I think you’re more than a little confused. I guess you just saying they should have not bailed them out, not that the bailout money should have come with no strings attached. Right? Because that would be idiotic — the kind of thing only someone who has never owned a business would say.
It’s funny that people can describe a rule ALLOWING merchants to decide what to charge based on how much it costs them to process a transaction as over-regulation.
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