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Conway Gittens: I’m Conway Gittens reporting from the New York Stock Exchange. Here’s what we’re watching on TheStreet today.
There were stock market jitters Tuesday but the Dow and the S&P 500 still squeezed out record closes. Consumer confidence surprisingly fell in September by the largest amount in 3 years. The Conference Board blamed the erosion on a softening jobs market.
Coming up on the calendar for Wednesday: New home sales, a weekly update on mortgage rates and applications, and quarterly results from Micron Technology.
Related: Mastercard, Visa want to do away with typing credit card numbers
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Turning to the day’s other headlines: The Justice Department is suing Visa, accusing the payment processing company of trying to run a monopoly in the world of debit card transactions.
According to the lawsuit, Visa tried to strong-arm merchants into only using its debit card processing network and penalized those who wouldn’t agree through a fee payment structure. And the anti-competitive allegations don’t stop there. It is alleged that Visa paid PayPal, Apple, and fintech startup Block hundreds of millions of dollars through agreements that blocked the potential rivals from developing competing products.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said “Visa’s unlawful conduct affects not just the price of one thing, but the price of nearly everything.”
Visa has been under the watchful eyes of regulators and watchdogs for some time. The DOJ started investigating Visa’s business practices back in 2021. A year before that, it sued to block Visa’s $5.3 billion acquisition of Plaid, a fintech startup. And earlier this year, a federal judge knocked down a $30 billion settlement over the fees Visa – and its rival MasterCard – charge.
Visa takes in $7 billion in fees each year, according to the Justice Department.
That’ll do it for your Daily Briefing. From the New York Stock Exchange, I’m Conway Gittens with TheStreet.
