To mark his first year back in the White House, President Donald Trump called for a one-year cap of 10 percent on credit-card interest rates that was supposed to start on January 20, a year to the day after his inauguration. On Truth Social, he appeared to be saying that this was his way of dealing with the “AFFORDABILITY” crisis (his capital letters, needless to say), along with ordering Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase $200 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities and a few other measures.
But never mind that. Here we are, with January 20 having come and gone, and as you may have noticed, not a single bank has complied. And they’re not going to, unless Congress enacts a law to enforce a usury cap. Jamie Dimon, the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase and the most prominent banker in the country, called the idea “an economic disaster.” Richard Fairbank, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Capital One, which is heavily reliant on high-interest credit cards, told investors on a conference call that an interest-rate cap “would likely bring on a recession.” And the American Bankers Association denounced the plan as well, saying that it would bring “harm to small businesses and the broader U.S. economy,” among other things.
Other bankers are equally critical but won’t say anything on the record for fear of blowback from the president. Not that you can blame them. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that shortly after Dimon criticized Trump’s credit-card proposal, the president sued JPMorgan Chase and Dimon himself for at least $5 billion, for allegedly dropping him as a client after the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Or perhaps it wasn’t.
