maybe visa and mc have no truck morphing into lending money but lobbying govern on behalf on their credit card issuer mates??? maybe that's on the cards...helping their credit card mates protect 'their patch'?
eg. a number of merchants I know personally are fearful of requesting their bank to change their pos terminal default settings (ie to change their default payment rail from visa/mc to eftpos where lower merchant fees apply).
merchants fear if they do this, then visa/mc may retaliate by jacking up interchange on their mc/visa transactions ...so many small time merchants simply stay silent
