Paracaidas posted:

A pair of really interesting polls catching attention right now:
First, we have what people are hearing out of messaging:
https://mobile.twitter.com/aedwardslevy/status/1574055846501310464

Followed by what people consider most important:
https://mobile.twitter.com/EmGusk/status/1573886721091059712

As additional background, we're starting to see more aggregates putting House control within the margin of error come November

Insider posted:

Two of the most senior members of the House Jan. 6 committee said they believe Donald Trump committed wrongdoing in relation to the riot, but said that the committee will act unanimously when it decides whether or not to refer the former president for prosecution.

Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democratic member of the committee; and Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican, discussed the investigation in separate interviews over the weekend. The panel is due to resume its public hearings on Wednesday.

Schiff said that he will make his decision align with the rest of the committee so that the committee acts unanimously, even though he believes Trump should be referred.

"We operate with a high degree of consensus and unanimity," Schiff told CNN's Jake Tapper on 'State of the Union' Sunday. "It will be certainly, I think, my recommendation, my feeling, that we should make referrals, but we will get to a decision as a committee, and we will all abide by that decision, and I will join our committee members if they feel differently.

"I do agree there have been several laws broken and it is, I think, apparent that there is evidence that Donald Trump was involved in breaking several of those laws," Schiff continued.

"When Congress does find evidence that people have broken the law, it is not always the case that it makes a referral, but in circumstances like these, I think that's the better part of the argument."

In an interview with the Texas Tribune, Rep. Liz Cheney expressed the same sentiment.

Cheney, who has been ousted from her Wyoming congressional seat over her participation in the investigation, said that Trump had been closely involved in the plot to overturn the 2020 election, and that she believed that whatever verdict the panel reached it'd be unanimous.

"One of the things that has surprised me the most about my work on this committee is how sophisticated the plan was that Donald Trump was involved in and oversaw every step of the way," Cheney said. "It was a multipart plan that he oversaw, he was involved in personally and directly."

She said she anticipated a unanimous decision from the panel, whatever conclusions it arrived at.

"I think we will be unanimous," she said. "In whatever action we take, we will be unanimous."

When the committee concludes its investigation, which was launched more than a year ago, it will decide whether or not to refer Trump for prosecution by the Justice Department. It is expected to do so before the November midterms, Reuters reported.

The DOJ is conducting its own, separate investigation into the riot, which has recently touched on Trump's inner circle of aides.

The committee held dramatic public hearings over the summer, where it heard how Trump for months after his 2020 election defeat pushed baseless claims that that victory had been stolen from despite the fact he knew, or ought to have known, that his claims were false.

A former White House aide described how he sought to lead a mob to the Capitol he knew to be armed, and watched the violence unfold on television when he returned to the White House, resisting the entreaties of allies to try and quell the unrest.

Committee members have previously given mixed signals about whether Trump will be referred for prosecution, with Rep. Bennie Thompson's saying in June that the panel would not refer the former president for prosecution. He met with resistance from other committee members.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in relation to the riot, but has also lauded the rioters and said he would be open to pardoning those convicted over their role in the riot of he is re-elected as president.

Dick Trauma posted:

The right-wing outrage cycle is running on fumes, but at least it's entertaining. I wonder why Republican voters never seem to get tired of it. It seems exhausting!

https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/1574222109659856901?s=20&t=7hMUVz6q0vDmWFubVoV9dQ

Twincityhacker posted:

Not actually US news, but saw the news about the school shooting in Izhevsk and it took a minute or two to sink in that "Oh, that's in Russia!" and not in the US.

I like to think it's because of the lock that the US has on mass shootings ( the US has had 17 in 2022 vs Russia's 4 ) and not centerisim. ( with a dash of brain fog. )

Jaxyon posted:

17? LOL, it's way more than that

https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting

HonorableTB posted:

Haven't seen this posted in the thread yet, but lol they're gonna let Trump walk because no way the chuds on the committee are gonna vote for prosecutory referral

quote:

How JPMorgan’s plan to kill credit cards split the bank

The diktat came from Jamie Dimon during a closed-door meeting at JPMorgan Chase’s headquarters in November. Facing growing pressure from nimbler fintechs, the chief executive of the biggest US bank pushed the leaders of his two largest divisions to put aside any differences and collaborate on a new payments processing system.

“If I hear that any of you aren’t sharing information with each other, or you’re hiding information, you’re fired,” Dimon told the 15 or so executives who had gathered for the meeting in New York, according to two people with knowledge of the remarks.

Dimon’s pronouncement was delivered in his usual wisecracking style, but it reflected the challenges big banks face as they try to modernise their technology.

The new system being developed by JPMorgan’s corporate and investment bank — the CIB — would enable merchants to receive payments directly from consumers, cutting out the need for debit or credit cards and posing a threat to the lucrative fees earned by banks and dominant card companies Visa and Mastercard.

The belief in some parts of the CIB that this “pay-by-bank” product had the potential to supplant plastic created inevitable tensions with JPMorgan’s consumer and community banking division — the CCB — which booked more than $5bn in card revenues in 2021.

Dimon, however, reckoned it was better to risk existing revenue than to allow non-bank competitors to beat JPMorgan to the punch.

It had happened before: Dimon has said JPMorgan should have built its own mobile payments platform for merchants before Square, the fintech company co-founded by Jack Dorsey and now renamed Block.

“Jamie wants to understand products that could be threats to banking institutions,” said one person familiar with the project. “If [pay-by-bank] is going to be widely adopted, the bank needs to be there. If long-term it fails, it’s a bit of an insurance policy.”

Discussion at the six-hour event last November focused on how the many powerful internal interest groups inside JPMorgan would divvy up the pay-by-bank project. Executives in attendance included Daniel Pinto, the bank’s president and CIB head, as well as Marianne Lake and Jennifer Piepszak, who had recently been promoted to co-run the CCB, replacing the more powerful Gordon Smith in 2021.

Pinto and Smith had given the appearance of engaging in a friendly rivalry, joking at company events that their division was the bank’s biggest, while citing different metrics. The two also temporarily led the bank in 2020 after Dimon underwent emergency heart surgery.

When Smith left JPMorgan, Pinto became sole president. Whereas Smith had been on level footing with Pinto, Lake and Piepszak did not have the same title.

The emerging game plan was to have the CIB deal with the technology and build relationships with merchants, while the CCB worked to clarify customer protections in the event of misuse or fraud.

JPMorgan declined to comment on what happened at the meeting, which also touched on other payments projects at the bank.

Takis Georgakopoulos, JPMorgan’s global head of payments for CIB, said the bank had spent “a great deal of time” working on pay-by-bank through talking to merchants and understanding consumer protections.

“The relationship between the CCB and CIB is as close as it’s ever been. We all know that innovation in payments is one of the firm’s greatest opportunities and we’re committed to it,” Georgakopoulos told the Financial Times.

JPMorgan’s move into pay-by-bank responded to demand from merchants, such as Amazon and Walmart, chafing at banks and card companies hoovering up interchange fees that average 1.8 per cent per transaction in the US, according to payments consultancy firm CMSPI. In the EU, interchange fees are capped at 0.3 per cent for credit card payments and 0.2 per cent for debit cards.

Skimming a little bit from every card swipe adds up. In 2020, merchants in the US paid about $110bn in processing fees for $7.6tn worth of card transactions, according to the Nilson Report.

Pay-by-bank, which would enable sellers to take payment directly from a customer’s bank account, is part of the growing movement towards “open banking” — securely allowing consumers to give financial providers the ability to access their financial information.

JPMorgan already allows account holders to instantly pay one another through Zelle, a mobile application launched by the largest US banks in 2017. However, Zelle’s use for retail payments remains extremely limited. Bankers have said this is partly because it is run by a separate company owned by a consortium of lenders.

Bank transfer payments have caught on in countries such as the Netherlands and India, but US consumers have been slower to take it up.

This is partly because of the country’s clunky bank-to-bank automated clearing house, a network that settles payments in days rather than seconds and whose roots trace back to the 1970s. This may change next year with the US Federal Reserve aiming to launch FedNow, a new rapid payments service for big banks, and is another reason why JPMorgan is moving on pay-by-bank.

In the short term, JPMorgan believes pay-by-bank is an alternative for rent and bill payments as well as cash, high-priced debit and cheques, rather than for credit cards, according to people involved in the project.

In the longer term, however, the bank is making sure it is ready for the potential demise of credit cards.

JPMorgan is not the first to try and disrupt the credit card industry. In 2012, a consortium of major US chains, including Walmart, Target and Best Buy, tried and failed to get a product past a trial stage before selling it to JPMorgan in 2017.

Executives at the big card companies privately remain sceptical that pay-by-bank will dislodge credit cards in the US anytime soon, given deeply ingrained consumer habits, generous reward programmes and fraud protections that are more clearly defined than competing payment options.

But despite their confidence, card companies have taken steps to bolster their ability to facilitate direct transactions, including the recent acquisitions of fintechs Tink and Finicity by Visa and Mastercard respectively.

And banks such as JPMorgan — long incentivised to maintain the status quo since they accrue the bulk of interchange fees from card payments — are hedging their bets too, hoping pay-by-bank can replace at least some of those threatened revenues.

That is why Dimon stepped in and urged his teams to push past the tensions and pre-empt any disruption.

JPMorgan is now aiming to take pay-by-bank live next year and is in talks with at least one fintech company over a partnership to provide infrastructure support, according to people briefed on the plans.

The CIB and CCB are still collaborating on the project. In July, the bank held a “Senior Leaders Payments Offsite” where around 40 senior executives from the two divisions gathered at the posh Cipriani restaurant in Manhattan.

This time, Dimon did not feel the need to turn up, let alone issue any warnings.

Push El Burrito posted:

I'm not a huge economy dude but wouldn't that effectively kill the idea of credit ratings?

Because if so I'm all for it.

Push El Burrito posted:

I'm not a huge economy dude but wouldn't that effectively kill the idea of credit ratings?

Because if so I'm all for it.

joe football posted:

Kind of like the intermediary of a credit card between someone who wants my money and my actual money. I know Europe basically gets along without credit cards though

Jaxyon posted:

17? LOL, it's way more than that

https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

On the one hand, it does suck for merchants that they have to pay a fee for every product they sell to a third-party just to take payments and nearly instant bank-to-bank transfers would be a massive improvement over ACH that can take days to verify or credit cards that take some extra fees from the merchant for no real reason.

Main Paineframe posted:

How does JP Morgan make money on that? Someone is going to have to pay fees at some point in the transaction, otherwise the service wouldn't make any money. They might subsidize it in the short-term to give themselves a foothold, but in the long run they'll be charging someone for this service, and merchants are the natural target to slap fees on.

Eric Cantonese posted:

I feel like many people use credit cards to purchase things over time that they don't have the funds to purchase all at once. Credit card companies are often like layaway lenders so that the businesses themselves don't have to setup their own programs.

I'm curious how far the individual consumer appeal is going to go. If going straight from your account was really that appealing, wouldn't everyone have migrated to debit cards already?

Main Paineframe posted:

How does JP Morgan make money on that? Someone is going to have to pay fees at some point in the transaction, otherwise the service wouldn't make any money. They might subsidize it in the short-term to give themselves a foothold, but in the long run they'll be charging someone for this service, and merchants are the natural target to slap fees on.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Debit cards don't go straight from your account. The bank and person receiving the money still pay fees for debit card transactions (they are just much smaller than credit card swipe fees). They still use Visa/Mastercard payment processors and ACH takes a few days to verify before the transaction is complete. That is why over drafting is a thing that is possible.

Solkanar512 posted:

I'm also wondering how holds work with gas, hotels and rental cars.

Solkanar512 posted:

I'm also wondering how holds work with gas, hotels and rental cars.

Wayne Knight posted:

But how do you handle "I know I'm going to charge you, but I don't yet know how much." Like with (please don't derail) tipping

Twibbit posted:

Would also for good and ill end the ability of Credit card providers being able to essentially Veto who gets to do business online. I mostly view that as a positive though I am sure there are examples of them killing at least one type of shittyess before.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted: