“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
Europe Fights to Loosen America’s Grip on Payment Systems - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-16/europe-fi... | https://archive.today/o699I - June 16th, 2026
China nears launch of mBridge as alternative to Swift – report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636931 - June 2026
Which is the reason the US is also shooting itself in the foot every time it rug pulls them.
If you want people to trust and rely on your thing then you kind of need to avoid being untrustworthy and unreliable.
What global payments system? We have the worst payment systems in the developed world.
The US money transfer situation is so bad that all the major banks got tired of The Fed's incompetence...and simply bypassed The Fed. That's how we ended up with Zelle, which actually does instantaneous (or at least within minutes) transfers.
In 2026 it is virtually impossible to quickly move money from one account to another because every single bit of it has to pass through the US Federal Reserve's ancient systems. We're the laughing stock of the rest of the world's banking systems. Thirty years ago europeans could walk into a store, do a fund transfer to pay for something, and walk out. We still can't do that.
Literally the only way to buy something expensive in a store in the US is via credit card.
You can't use a debit card because of transaction limits and lack of consumer protections.
You can't use any of the "app" payment methods.
You can't do wire transfers.
You can't do checks because the US check clearing system is so bad, a check can initially clear (after a day or five), and then weeks later, bounce.
You can't do cash because it's now legal for cops to consider having an unusual amount of cash to be enough for reasonable suspicion and they've done some gymnastics that allow them to seize the cash and keep it even if the person is not charged or charges are dismissed.
Zelle made it through by having various limitations that make it hard for it to displace credit cards, and even that took decades before it happened.
My debit card is branded Visa so it has the Visa Zero Liability protections, and I can raise the purchase limit from $6k to $25k using the app.
Which is why FedNow went live in 2024. In 2025 it already completed processing of $864 billion in transactions in real time.
https://www.frbservices.org/resources/financial-services/fed...
2026 is already looking to exceed $1 trillion in transactions.
To be fair:
- 3% is on the higher end of the fees amounts. In the EU they are now capped at 0.3% for example
- part of the interchange fee goes to the issuing bank, which is usually local
Whereas if you give other countries the obvious win that they can stop paying ~3% of their entire economy to a foreign payments network then you lose the fees anyway and that other stuff on top of it.