This week marks the fourth anniversary of the “Durbin amendment,” a defective law directing the Federal Reserve to impose price-controls on debit interchange fees.
Slipped into the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill at the eleventh hour, the amendment has resulted in billions of dollars in revenue for merchants and not even a Slurpee of savings for consumers.
Big-box retailers like Target, Walgreens, Home Depot, and Walmart promised Congress they would pass their savings — about $8 billion annually — to consumers in the form of lower prices. From the beginning, critics of the law, including consumer groups, predicted that retailers would pocket these savings instead.
