This is the best summary I could come up with:

Today I’m writing about why credit card giant Capital One is trying to buy Discover for $35 billion, which has to do with a loophole the Federal Reserve inserted into our banking laws.

In addition, being able to reject someone from the payments system is a core sovereign power, and the stated reason the right is so afraid of a central bank digital currency.

As the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found, margins for credit cards are persistent, increasing, high, and tilted towards the larger firms in the industry.

The key quote from Capital One co-founder and CEO Richard Fairbank on the call announcing the deal was this: “The holy grail is to be an issuer with our own network.”

(Though American Express’s status as a three party network isn’t strictly accurate, U.S. Bank does issue credit cards that operate on AMEX).

Nowhere else in the world is there a payments system in which 1.5-3.5% of trillions of dollars of transactions goes to a set of middlemen, but that’s how credit cards work in America, much to the chagrin of merchants, both small ones and the giants like Walmart.

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