Last week The Hill ran a piece by Merchant Payments Coalition Chairman and National Retail Federation SVP Mallory Duncan, in which he asked Congress to adopt a European model of price fixing and give big box retailers a multibillion handout at the expense of American consumers.
For those who have been following the payments industry for the past decade, his demand for government price fixing of credit interchange rates – the fee that merchants pay to accept credit cards — will come as no surprise. What makes this demand so remarkable is the fact that it blatantly ignores the failures of these policies in the U.S. and around the world.