2014考研英语：阅读理解基础之练习题(五)
Text 5
Legend has it that the first credit card was born in 1950 over lunch at a Manhattan restaurant when Alfred Bloomingdale and his colleague Francis McNamara dreamed up the idea of creating a third party to cover checks at restaurants. They called it Diners Club. But the scheme faced a "chicken-and-egg problem". Consumers didn't want card until stores accepted it, and merchants wouldn't accept it until consumers carried it.
To solve the problem, and to work around federal laws that prevented banks from operating across state lines, banks joined together to form "network joint ventures", such as Visa and MasterCard. Under these arrangements, some member banks recruited consumers, others recruited merchants. The banks on both ends earned fees, and they shared the costs of maintaining the networks.
Because of an antitrust dispute twenty-five years ago, Visa allows its member banks to join up with MasterCard as well. But it refuses to allow them to collaborate with any other network. The Justice Department is less appreciative. In October 1998—shortly before Paying with Plastic went to press—the government charged Visa and MasterCard with violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. (Wal-Mart and a group of big retailers have filed a related suit, charging that Visa and MasterCard have colluded to keep fees on their debit cards unfairly high. ) The trouble is that today Visa and MasterCard have pretty much the same member banks. Do two ventures with the same owners really have an incentive to compete?
According to the government's complaint, in 1987 MasterCard was prepared to introduce the first "smart card" — a card with an integrated circuit that could store personal data. But MasterCard's board refused to proceed without Visa's go-ahead. Today both brands are still developing a smart card, sharing information all the while. The situation doesn't exactly encourage competition. As Visa International's president and chief executive put it in an unguarded moment in 1992, "If you have got one foot firmly placed on both sides of the street, who cares?"
Some people insist that the Visa-MasterCard partnership does not harm competition or innovation. They point to Visa and MasterCard's rival advertising campaigns and to Citibank's recent decision to switch its primary allegiance from Visa to MasterCard because only MasterCard would allow it to relegate the network insignia to the back of its plastic cards. The reason no one has introduced smart cards, says Evans, is because the chip technology is too expensive. "It is a silly argument," he says. "The Justice Department is trying to fix something that isn't broken. This industry is extraordinarily successful. "
Indeed, however the case turns out, the most popular complaint against the consumer-credit business is likely to remain what it was a century ago: The industry succeeds all too well at putting expensive credit in the hands of weak-willed shoppers. (466 words)
