Posted on 02/20/2024 5:59:27 AM PST by Red Badger
Capital One announced on Monday it was acquiring a rival financial services company in a massive stock deal as Americans continue to be plagued with credit card debt, according to The New York Times.
The McLean, Virginia-based bank announced it would acquire Discover Financial Services in a $35.3 billion all-stock transaction, The New York Times reported. The acquisition of Discover would give Capital One more market power due to Discover having a payments network of its own at the same time as credit card debt continues to mount for consumers, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The acquisition could face a major hurdle from federal regulators, The New York Times reported. The Comptroller of the Currency announced it wanted to slow down the process to approve mergers and acquisitions on Jan. 29.
“It is very difficult to imagine how federal regulators could allow Capital One to buy Discover given the requirement that mergers benefit the public as well as insiders,” National Community Reinvestment Coalition President and CEO Jesse Van Tol told The New York Times.
Discover shareholders will receive a 26% premium over the company’s closing stock price, getting a little less than 102 shares of Capital One stock for every 100 shares of Discover stock if regulators approve the acquisition.
The deal comes as Americans’ total household debt hit $17.5 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2023. Credit card delinquencies of 90 days or more rose to 6.36% at the end of 2023, while total credit card debt rose to $1.13 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
“Credit card and auto loan transitions into delinquency are still rising above pre-pandemic levels,” New York Fed advisor Wilbert van der Klaauw said in a statement. “This signals increased financial stress, especially among younger and lower-income households.”
Capital One and Discover did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Check out Bankrate.com I’ve see banks with savings accounts over 5%.
But read the fine print.
>>>>(point out the tiny Diner’s Club logo on the back of the card).<<<<
I never noticed!..................😎
“The reality is most people are poor because they are not very bright. Anyone who thinks it is a good idea to carry credit car debt month over month falls in that category.”
49$ of the middle class isn’t any smarter than the poor, they carry credit card debt forward too, on top of car payments, trailer payments, motorcycles, snowmobiles, boats, and every other fast depreciating asset you can name. Then there’s the vacations...
As a vendor or customer. Man, if you did not run enough of their cards they would whack you with a monthly fee and a high transaction fee. I had one small’ish transaction that netted me $1.50 after all their junk. Amex was just as bad, but I had a LOC through them, so it made it easier to take.
But they're going to let Capital One acquire Discover?
-PJ
Walmart finally got the message and greatly upped their online selection of goods to choose from. Their early online goods list was paltry compared to Amazon.
I first go to Walmart online, then I try Amazon if I don't find what I'm looking for. For generic items, Walmart online has what I need, it's only with the more obscure items where I have to look farther.
There are small areas of overlap, but being a bank and being a credit card network are fundamentally different businesses.
This merger is Capital One wanting to join Amex is being a company that does both.
What discover did was charge a monthly base fee.
My business was pretty small. I would run under $100k in credit cards in a year. Amex charge me a high transaction/merchant fee. But for the few times I ran discover…they absolutely killed me.
My transactions were pretty small—averaging $25-30 per sale. So if it was THE Discover transaction in the month, it was a monthly fee and the transaction fee. If you subtract my production costs…it wasn’t worth it. Since I couldn’t drive sales to Discover, I ended up just not taking it.
Still trying to figure out how this benefits the public.
AMEX charges the most, something like 4% or so. So a grocery store with low margins doesn't benefit much.
Sears is a fascinating story.
The Sears catalogue was Amazon. It sold everything you could want and would deliver it to your door. For most of the 20th century it was how most Americans bought most things.
They shut down the catalogue in 1993. A year before Amazon launched.
It was a trillion dollar mistake.
One of the best days of the year as a kid was the day the Sears Christmas Wish Book came in the mail.
I opened a Discover saving account 20-some years ago. Every check-in-the-mail I got went into it. It’s now about $13,000.
I considered that my emergency Alpo money. (So broke I have to eat dog food) It will probably still be there wnen I die.
“Still trying to figure out how this benefits the public.”
Every time you buy a $3 coffee using a credit card Visa or Mastercard takes 25 cents of that. They make a huge profit because they have no real competition.
If Capital+Discover can compete to push that cost down, your cup of coffee gets cheaper.
“Check out Bankrate.com I’ve see banks with savings accounts over 5%.
But read the fine print.”
I have a couple of CDs and several MMFs but for almost 2 years short term T-Bills have easily beaten MMFs after taxes. When I started buying them, MMFs were at .5%, 3-monT-Bills were 1.8%, with no state taxes (in my case 4.75%) paid. Now my MMFs are around 4.5%, T-Bills are around 5.3, peaked at about 5.51%.
A CD or MMF at 5.25% for a person in the 22% bracket will net: 3.84% after taxes. A T-Bill at 5.25% will net about 5.0% after state taxes. Too easy. The largest holding in my stock accounts is T-Bills. Next is stock ET, paying out a 9.04% (annualized) dividend today by coincidence. It’s around $14.65, big houses have target prices from $17-$22.
I am the same way. Life is rarely easy but it is usually pretty simple. Avoid debt, buy with care, and hang on to your money.
Best card I own. Great customer service accepted everywhere and has a competitive rate though I pay mine off every month.
“So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern...Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men who made their living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had nothing to do with the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being nonexistent persons.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Discover owns Diners Club. The Diners Club logo is on the back of the Discover Card...............................
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