Aren’t the ‘poor’ already paying the fees now? I mean its in the price of whatever they are buying.
No. The price was reflecting not only the cost of transaction processing (plus profit, obviously), but also the cost of risk. Now, if the profit on transaction is minimized or eliminated, the debit / credit cards issuers will go back to the olden days of charging annual fees for the privilege, which will make a certain percent of customers (est. at 5%) to become "unbanked".
Similar situation is developing in the checking / savings banking, where the "consumer protection" will not allow charging higher interest rates and/or fees to higher risk customers, so the services which used to be free or low-cost are either eliminated or the fees / requirements are raised on every customer... again pushing the unprofitable low-end accounts to exit bank services and become "unbanked".
Here are a just a few tales of woe, and the new "unbanked" thanks to Dodd-Frank FinReg bill:
See Lack of Credit Leads Some Borrowers to Controversial Payday Lenders - post #7, FR posted by CutePuppy | 2011 January 13.
Just as Sarbanes-Oxley started to drive corporate capital from the U.S. overseas and remove incentives for companies (foreign and domestic) to invest in the U.S., Dodd-Frank is pushing corporate and individual investors out of the U.S.
Jamie Dimon is just the first of high-profile banking executives to point this out in the open... His position allows him and he has issued non-PC statements before, which cost him at least two invitations to the Obama's WH (not that he misses it).
Absolutely, they are already paying the fees now, in terms of higher priced products, ATM fees at third party ATMs ($2 - $4 per transaction), Debit fees at markets and gas stations (up to a dollar per transaction.)
Even if they were 'forced' to pay $10 a month for their checking account, they'd probably come out ahead over a year. I suspect, however, that this is the usual doomsday statements that come before regulation is finalized, to help change how the final regulations will appear.
Mind you, most of these fees are taxes by the banking industry on mostly Mom & Pop businesses. Intercharge, connection, settlement, batch fees, as well as the transaction fees themselves would typically come to 3 percent of our family's business' total gross, and that was with us digging around to find the best possible deals. Others in the same shopping center as ourselves were paying upwards of five percent of their gross in transaction fees.
Now I'm not eager for federal regulation to step in, and here I think it's mostly a case of federal regulation trying to fix the problems that previous federal regulations put in. Banks found a great revenue stream with businesses held hostage, giving banking customers all sorts of incentives to use those debit cards to buy everything, while at the same time collecting huge amounts at the retail point of sale, then holding the money until they decided it was time to deposit.
My absolute highest hatred went for American Express which loved to charge a $15 'statement fee' in any month that an Amex charge done. We finally dropped accepting Amex simply because too many times, there'd be one or two charges in a month, both charges totaling less than $10, and we'd get socked with that $15 fee, on top of the 3.5% of the transaction, atop the 35 cent transaction fee, atop the 5 cent batch fee...
I do not support government interfearance but the banks are raping their customers more and more with excessive fees and expenses just so the fat cats can have their super bonuses.
The banks that we as taxpayers bailed out in 2008. And don’t tell me to move to another bank cause I have done that and all of them are doing the same thing.