Harriet Torry

speaker

611 appearances 11 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2017 last heard Dec 2024

Harriet Torry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Credit Card Use Deepens Divide Between Consumer Groups · 22 Jun 2020 podcast

They say that that covers things like fraud protection and so on.

So it's, you know, it's a complex transaction.

But for smaller and bigger merchants, some bigger merchants have negotiated fees directly with the card companies to have the fees be lower.

But, you know, small businesses don't tend to have that bargaining power.

I mean, it's a bit too early to say, but one thing that, you know, a lot of small businesses are doing now is not accepting cash because people are freaked out about touching money because of the potential to spread the virus on coins and bills.

So, you know, a lot of businesses are now moving to completely cashless transactions.

Now, credit cards are not the only option for that.

They're also...

You know, you can use a digital wallet, there's PayPal and things like that.

But I think definitely one thing that we're seeing early on is that credit cards are being and debit cards are being used more rather than less because people are just very freaked out about touching money and about when you pay for something with a card, you can often do it, you know, remotely or you don't have to sort of touch things that the merchant has already touched and you just limit that person to person contact.

it's definitely true i mean credit cards undoubtedly have many benefits for for merchants and um i think studies have also shown that people tend to spend more um when they're using cards so it's it's true that merchants definitely get a lot from being cashless but um at the same time there are these swipe fees and transaction costs that are largely invisible to consumers but do have a very real effect on on what we call payment inequality so for instance

If you're a low-income consumer who can't get a credit card because they have a low credit score, you are implicitly, you know, you're paying these higher prices across the board and implicitly subsidizing the cash back and the rewards and the other, all the free stuff that goes to, tends to flow towards high-income spenders.

Thanks so much.

WSJ Your Money Briefing · Surprise: Home Prices Have Risen During the Pandemic · 8 May 2020 podcast

That probably explains some of the caution that people are feeling in listing their homes.

You know, they might just be taking a wait-and-see mentality of, let's, you know, this is too uncertain a time to be listing our homes.

This is essentially a supply problem.

So although demand has clearly taken a hit because of the coronavirus pandemic and people are being hesitant to make a big purchase like a home purchase, home prices are holding up because supply is extremely low.

Low inventory has been kind of a feature of this economic recovery.

You know, not enough houses have been built and a lot of, you know, there's just low supply on the market and that has pushed up prices pretty steadily.

But another thing that's worth mentioning is that the data that we have so far only runs through March and home sales tend to have a bit of, you know, like a one or a two month lag.

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