Paying more at national parks
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Who doesn't like lower credit card interest rates? Well, banks. I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. This week we started to get quarterly profit reports. As is tradition, banks are early in that lineup and profits have generally been great this week. But within that industry, there's concern about President Trump's plan to try to cap credit card interest rates at 10 percent if they were to get through Congress. Christopher Lowe is chief economist at FHN Financial.
Here's the deal, right? Most credit card interest rates are over 20%, which is remarkably high compared to other interest rates. The reason is it's an unsecured loan. If you ultimately find you can't pay, you can walk away from it. That comes with penalties, of course, but from a bank's perspective, it's still money lent and lost. The way they cover those losses is by charging everybody these extraordinarily high interest rates. Even good borrowers pay over 20%. High-risk borrowers, well, they pay the highest rates. If the rate is capped at 10, banks simply won't be able to cover their losses. Delinquencies on credit cards are running at about 12.5%. The math doesn't work. And as a result... For many people, what they'll find is the lowest interest rate is zero because that's what you pay when you don't have a card.
By the way, we should stipulate this is not going to sail through a Republican-led Congress. There are lobbyists for banks with friends in Congress, and it's going to be a vigorous discussion.
although that's absolutely right then you know also traditionally republicans don't much like price controls which is basically what this is uh... i i don't think it will sail through but it is an astonishing thing uh... coming from a republican president it's it's the kind of suggestion we expect to hear from people like bernie sanders and elizabeth warren but uh... populism these days It's a two-party process.
All right. Or at least the rhetoric of populism at a time in which the key word affordability is front and center. Chris Lowe, chief economist at FHN Financial. Thank you.
Thank you, David.
The White House and the governors of some mid-Atlantic states today are expected to announce a plan to cap energy prices by, in effect, making power-hungry tech companies shoulder the cost of new power plants. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzer has more.
The White House and governors are trying to answer this question. Who's going to pay for the massive amounts of power consumed by data centers being built across the country? The biggest concentration of data centers stretches across 13 states, including the Washington, D.C. area, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. That power market is served by the grid operator PJM Interconnection. The Trump administration and some of the region's governors plan to tell PJM to auction off 15-year contracts for future power generation to tech companies. This was first reported by Bloomberg. Bloomberg says PJM will not be at the meeting, and the administration's plan is a non-binding statement of principles. The plan also apparently includes a request for PJM to cap prices for power auctions this year.
The consumer advocacy group Powerline says utilities asked for or received more than $34 billion worth of rate increases in the first three quarters of last year, more than double what was requested or approved over the same time frame in 2024. I'm Nancy Marshall-Genzer for Marketplace.
Foreign visitors to 11 of the most popular national parks in the U.S. will have to pay a lot more to get in, up to $100 a head more. The additional revenue could help the parks, which include Yellowstone, Bryce Canyon, and Sequoia. But other park advocates worry the price increase could also have negative consequences. Marketplace's Carla Javier reports.
The popularity of the parks is a blessing and a burden, says Tate Watkins at the Property and Environment Research Center. It's a nonprofit that has advocated for price increases for foreign visitors.
It comes with very real impacts and costs to maintain these places.
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