The Future of Charge Card Networks
A new working paper titled "The Future of Charge Card Networks" (PDF) by authors Robert E. Litan and Alex J. Pollock has been published by the Brookings Institution.
"At the end of the day, therefore, if none of the major scenarios or alternatives to the status quo is likely to produce significant benefits to consumers, as a class, one wonders what all of the controversy is about. It is a legitimate question."
From the executive summary:
The general-purpose charge card is now ubiquitous and largely taken for granted. Annual charge card volume exceeds $5 trillion worldwide. Within the United States, nearly one billion cards are in use (about eight per household), and more than two billion worldwide.But charge cards, or more specifically, the cooperative networks that serve the largest card systems, Visa and MasterCard, are under legal attack through multiple lawsuits and under regulatory challenge in other countries.
We trace in this essay multiple possible future "scenarios." This focus on possible futures distinguishes our work from many earlier studies of this subject.
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