Comment by owisd

Doesn’t seem like regulatory capture is the issue, if the market was totally free to new entrants and you brought in a low fee card with no rewards then it’s going to fail in an unregulated environment because merchants won’t go to the hassle of offering tiered pricing to low fee cards if they’re not already offering tiered prices for cash, so no-one’s going to give up their existing rewards to still have to pay the same prices. Deregulation just ends up stuck in a local minimum where everyone’s effectively paying for the highest fee cards that the merchant will accept.