| Cards: Opportunities Abound In Crowded Payments Field
In the course of a decade, card-based payments have doubled in volume to account for 28 percent of all consumer payments. It's nearly half of the payments pie when excluding the amount spent on auto loans, mortgages and other debt vehicles unsuitable for cards. Credit or debit card use at the point of sale represents 56 percent of all purchases, interchange now accounts for 19 percent of issuers' revenues, and the number of card-accepting merchants now tops 6.1 million. It's obvious that consumers are comfortable swiping cards for groceries, utility bills, morning coffee and hamburgers. But as Celent notes in a new report on payment trends, cards are not close to conquering cash and checks: cards' growth market is $4.5 trillion. Much of that growth is going to be fueled by evolving trends in consumer behavior, added merchant choices and technology, as bank issuers seek innovative ways of building and retaining card customers whose average cost of acquisition is between $50 and $300.
A trial would fail, and split the U.S. when unity behind progressive ...
Michael Tomasky is American editor of the Guardian newspaper of London. He is American. High crimes and misdemeanors? Sure. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are constitutional rogues of the highest order. Strictly on the merits, impeachment proceedings should begin posthaste. But there are compelling reasons people - especially liberals who are most inclined to want to see Bush and Cheney in the dock - should step back and consider the larger ramifications of such a move. Most people think of impeachment as a purely legal action. But it is also - indeed, I'd argue that it is even chiefly - a political action. And political actions produce reactions that we may not be crazy about. My argument starts here: Barring any new and shocking information, impeachment will fail. Let me repeat: It. Will.
Fate Accomplice
Soon the deluge of letters reduced to a trickle and I was writing to only a handful of girls. Sharanya wrote to me relentlessly and her letters grew lengthier one after the other. After about six months of correspondence, we decided to meet. She flew down to Bangalore and spent a day with me. We got to know each other better and I was convinced that Sharanya was the woman with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life. She returned to Bombay the next day. We began calling up each other almost every other day. Then on the first of January something happened. I was returning home from a party when I got hit by a truck. My friends rushed me to hospital where a CT scan revealed the formation of a few blood clots in my right brain. I spent few days in the intensive care unit before I was discharged.
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