The Homa Files

Congress seems willing to regulate a lot of stuff that they don’t understand.

Hard to imagine somebody flummoxed  (<= one of my favorite words)  by ATMs has got a grasp on Credit Default Swaps … go figure.

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Excerpted from Washington Post: Aging Congress flummoxed by ATMs,  May 21, 2010

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) has long pushed an amendment to limit those pesky and expensive transaction fees at automated teller machines, but his fellow senators didn’t go along with the idea this week.

One possible explanation: Quite a few of Harkin’s aging colleagues appear to have little or no contact with the decades-old technology of cash machines.

• Sen. Ben Nelson (D), for example, told the Omaha World-Herald this week that he has never once used an ATM, relying on bank tellers instead.
• Sen. Mike Johanns (R), has used his ATM card fewer than five times.
• Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee has a bank card but doesn’t use it for cash.

The remarks also appear to provide further evidence of cloistered politicians and a generation gap in the halls of an aging Congress.

The average age of members is among the highest of any Congress in the past century

• The average age of senators is 63.1 years, which is three years higher than it was four years ago;
• The average for the House was 57.2 years, which is up by two years.
• The Senate’s longest-serving member, Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), is 92.

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Factoids

The first ATMs appeared in the United States in 1969 … there are more than 1.7 million machines worldwide.

Over 90%  percent of consumers use an ATM … about 60 percent of consumers use their bank’s ATM up to five time a month … ,12 percent use it at least 10 times a month.

Most banks barely break even on ATM fees — free customer withdrawals are typically paid for with charges to noncustomers …  but about half the ATMs in the country are operated by independent, for profit ATM operators.

Full article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/20/AR2010052003613.html?wpisrc=nl_tech

This entry was posted on May 25, 2010 at 7:39 am and is filed under Financial Reform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.