Comment by jmyeet

> I can see that Visa and Mastercard are freaking out, not because Pix can take over their business model, but because it can give ideas to other countries doing the same.

Oh they absolutely will. And the US government will come to their aid.

Consider the case of Bombardier [1], a Canadian airplane manufacturer. Boeing was caught with its pants down by Airbus with the A320/321 and panicked into making the 737MAX. Boeing has a captive audience with US airlines and the 737. A shared type rating is a massive advantage for Boeing but the economics of the Airbus narrow bodies were just too good.

Then along comes this Canadian companiy who saw an opportunity to create a narrow body commercial jet in this range (100-150 seats) and some US airlines were interested. To avoid this Boeing offered United a deep discount to not buy the CSeries and Bombardier responded with discounts of their own.

What happened? Boeing then went to the government and accused Bombardier of "dumping" as well as having goavernment subsidies. This is particularly funny if you know anything about the billions in subsidies Boeing gets from both Washington state and the federal government. The US governments made complaitns to the WTO and ended up imposing a 300% tariff on Bombardier, effectively killing that business. It eventually became the Airbus A220.

Free markets, by the way.

The US will punish foreign companies for competing on price by abusing process and treaties, ignoring it whne it's inconvenient, use tariffs with flimsy excuses, punish unrelated industries to apply pressure and otherwise bully other countries for daring to compoete.

Being American companies is unacceptable. So is doing anything that serve as a model to any other country that might threaten an American monopoly or oligopoly.

So prepare for accusations of government subsidies and the US applying pressure in unrelated areas because of this.

As an aside, the US does this with governments too. "Oh, you wanted to profit from your own natural resources and use that money for the benefit of the people? I think not. Look at this system of government that isn't working. Nevermind that we're starving it with brutal economic sanctions. It doesn't work. Look away. Nothing to see here."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_Bo...