{"id":513634,"date":"2026-01-13T18:14:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-13T18:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/513634\/"},"modified":"2026-01-13T18:14:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T18:14:09","slug":"stop-attacking-the-fed-and-credit-cards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/513634\/","title":{"rendered":"Stop attacking the Fed and credit cards"},"content":{"rendered":"

By KEN SWEET, AP Business Writer<\/strong><\/p>\n

NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Up until this week, Wall Street has generally benefited from the Trump administration\u2019s policies and has been supportive of the president. That relationship has suddenly soured.<\/p>\n

When President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill into law<\/a> in July, it pushed another significant round of tax cuts and also cut the budget of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, at times the banking industry\u2019s nemesis, by nearly half. Trump\u2019s bank regulators have also been pushing a deregulatory agenda that both banks and large corporations have embraced.<\/p>\n

But now the president has proposed a one-year, 10% cap on the interest rate on credit cards<\/a>, a lucrative business for many financial institutions, and his Department of Justice has launched an investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell<\/a> that many say threatens the institution that is supposed to set interest rates free of political interference.<\/p>\n

Bank CEOs warned the White House on Tuesday that Trump\u2019s actions will do more harm than good to the American economy.<\/p>\n

BNY Chief Executive Officer Robin Vince told reporters that going after the Fed\u2019s independence \u201cdoesn\u2019t seem, to us, to be accomplishing the administration\u2019s primary objectives for things like affordability, reducing the cost of borrowing, reducing the cost of mortgages, reducing the cost, of, everyday living for Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s not shake the foundation of the bond market and potentially, do something that could cause interest rates to actually get pushed up, because somehow there\u2019s lack of confidence in the Fed\u2019s independence,\u201d Vince added.<\/p>\n

The Federal Reserve\u2019s independence is sacrosanct among the big banks. While banks may have wanted Powell and other Fed policymakers to move interest rates one way or another more quickly, they have generally understood why Powell has done what he\u2019s done.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t agree with everything the Fed has done. I do have enormous respect for Jay Powell, the man,\u201d JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told reporters Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Along with the attacks on the Fed, President Trump is going after the credit card industry. With \u201caffordability\u201d likely to be a key issue in this year\u2019s midterm elections, Trump wants to lower costs for consumers and says he wants a 10% cap on credit card interest rates<\/a> in place by Jan. 20. Whether he hopes to accomplish this by bullying the credit card industry into just capping interest rates voluntarily, or through some sort of executive action, is unclear.<\/p>\n

The average interest rate on credit cards is between 19.65% and 21.5%, according to the Federal Reserve and other industry tracking sources. A cap of 10% would likely cost banks roughly $100 billion in lost revenue<\/a> per year, researchers at Vanderbilt University found. Shares of credit card companies like American Express, JPMorgan, Citigroup, Capital One and others fell sharply Monday as investors worried about the potential hit to profits these banks may face if an interest rate cap were implemented.<\/p>\n

In a call with reporters, JPMorgan\u2019s Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey Barnum indicated the industry was willing to fight with all resources at its disposal to stop the Trump administration from capping those rates.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur belief is that actions like this will have the exact opposite consequence to what the administration wants in terms of helping consumers,\u201d Barnum said. \u201cInstead of lowering the price of credit, it will simply reduce the supply of credit, and that will be bad for everyone: consumers, the broader economy, and yes, for us, also.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump seemed to double down on his attacks on the credit card industry overnight. In a post on his social media platform Truth Social, he said he endorsed a bill introduced by Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, that would likely cut into the revenue banks earn from merchants whenever they accept a credit card at point-of-sale.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone should support great Republican Senator Roger Marshall\u2019s Credit Card Competition Act, in order to stop the out of control Swipe Fee ripoff,\u201d Trump wrote.<\/p>\n

The comments from Wall Street are coming as the major banks report their quarterly results. JPMorgan<\/a>, the nation\u2019s largest consumer and investment bank, and The Bank of New York Mellon Corp., one of the world\u2019s largest custodial banks, both reported their results Tuesday with Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and others to report later this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By KEN SWEET, AP Business Writer NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Up until this week, Wall Street has generally…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":513635,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,1582,276,229466,3549,7264,72195,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,3642],"class_list":{"0":"post-513634","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-ceos-vs-trump","12":"tag-san-diego","13":"tag-sandiego","14":"tag-trump-economic-policy","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa","21":"tag-wall-street"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115889154572696539","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513634\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/513635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}