Debit cards are hidden financial infrastructure
The beginning of this article is a fairy tale that ignores what used to be one of the biggest drivers of revenue for banks: overdraft fees. Maybe the HN crowd has never been in a situation where they were auto-billed into a negative balance, which then caused an overdraft fee that then further drove their balance into negative territory, but this was a weekly/monthly fiasco for millions of Americans.<p>I was once in a meeting with one of the senior executives at JPMorgan, where the guy smugly told me he felt they were “doing a service for the community” by charging people overdraft fees. After leaving the meeting, my very senior colleague said, “I had to hold myself back from throwing that guy out of his window.”<p>These sorts of articles — half PR, half history lesson — tend to leave out these sorts of politically inconvenient but important bits of history. It’s so much work to unpack the bias...