With the November 3 midterms three weeks out, the Credit Card Competition Act has resurfaced as a White House affordability talking point. The target is interchange — the “swipe fee” a merchant pays the card-issuing bank on every transaction, roughly 1.5–3% of the sale, and distinct from the APR the cardholder pays. President Trump endorsed the Durbin–Marshall bill in January, it was reintroduced in both chambers the same day, and it has stayed in the administration’s cost-of-living messaging since. Vice President Vance was a Senate co-sponsor of the 2023 version. The mechanics are unchanged: issuers over $100 billion in assets would have to enable a second, unaffiliated network on every card, and the merchant picks the route.

Endorsement hasn’t meant passage. The bill still sits in Senate Banking, and the sponsors’ attempts to attach it to must-pass legislation — most recently the housing bill in March — failed. Banks and networks have kept it off the floor for four years running. The election puts it on the clock.

CCM’s June 2024 piece framed this as three tracks converging on one outcome: lower card fees. The scorecard since: the CFPB’s $8 late-fee cap was vacated by a Texas court in April 2025, with the Bureau’s assent. The Visa/Mastercard interchange litigation produced a revised $38 billion settlement that won preliminary approval in June — a 1.25% interchange cap on standard consumer cards, a 10 bp cut to the average effective interchange rate for five years, and the end of “honor all cards.” One track dead, one nearly done, and the legislative one now has the White House.

CCM read: The 2024 conclusion stands. Interchange funds rewards and underwrites the economics of the cards that drive issuer volume; cut it and issuers reprice through APRs, annual fees and thinner rewards, and tighten at the margin. The Durbin debit precedent says merchants, not consumers, keep most of the savings. For card ABS, interchange sits inside finance-charge collections, so the settlement alone trims trust yield; CCCA on top would compress excess spread a second time. The affordability pitch is popular; the bill mostly moves money from cardholders to merchants.

Consumer credit grew at a 1.9% annual rate in August. Revolving credit, mostly cards, fell at a 4.2% rate, a $4.8 billion drop and the largest monthly decline since November 2024. Nonrevolving credit (autos and student loans) rose at a 4.1% rate and supplied all of the growth. One month is noisy, so the better read is the trend: card balances are still up 3.2% from a year ago, but the three-month annualized pace has gone from 7.0% in April to 1.3% in August. Cards ran hot in the spring and have been flat since June, while the average APR on accounts carrying a balance moved back above 22%. The nonrevolving side flatters: August includes the fall student loan disbursement and a Labor Day shift that pulled auto sales forward from September.

CCM read: Total consumer credit is up about 2.7% from a year ago against 3.4% inflation, so in real terms households aren’t adding debt; they’re financing the same spending at higher prices. For card ABS, paydown shows up as a higher principal payment rate and slower receivables growth: good for trust credit, less good for excess spread as revolvers are replaced by transactors. The September remits will show whether it reached the securitized books.

Freddie Mac’s 30-year fixed rose to 7.40% for the week of October 8, up from 7.28% and from 6.30% a year ago, the highest since late 2023. That lands on a housing market that was already stalled: NAR’s August report had existing-home sales at a 3.98 million annual pace, the first sub-4-million reading since June 2025, with months’ supply at 4.9 and the median price up 1.6% from a year ago, flat in real terms. Inventory is rising and prices have stopped climbing; buyers are not coming back at these rates.

CCM read: The consumer credit angle is that the household balance sheet is frozen, not fragile. Most outstanding mortgages carry rates far below today’s, so the cash-out refinance channel is closed, and HELOC borrowing, while growing (balances up $13 billion in Q2 to $459 billion), is small next to what cash-out refis supplied in 2021. That pushes marginal consumption onto cards and keeps the payment hierarchy tilted toward the mortgage: the house payment gets made, the card payment is what flexes. Expect card trust performance to reflect price pressure before it reflects housing pressure.

Initial claims printed 197,000 for the week ending October 3, down 2,000, with the four-week average at 198,000. Continued claims rose 17,000 to 1.716 million for the week ending September 26, but that follows a revised 1.699 million that was the lowest since March 2023, and the series has held in a 1.70 to 2.0 million band since mid-2023. Both measures are low. Claims only capture insured unemployment, so they don’t see every income-stressed borrower, but there is no layoff wave in this data.

CCM read: For nonprime auto and card pools, the variable that drives cure rates is how long a laid-off borrower stays off payroll, not how many get laid off. That makes continued claims the line to watch, and right now it is benign. The stress visible in card paydown and student loan delinquency is a rate and price story, not a jobs story.

The NY Fed’s Q2 report put student loan balances 90+ days past due at 10.6%, up from 10.3% in Q1 and far above any other consumer loan type. The stock keeps rising largely for a mechanical reason: during the pandemic payment pause, servicers reported every federal borrower as current, including those already in default. Since reporting resumed in late 2024, those defaults have been flowing back into the bureau data, and the Fed itself flags the distortion. The flow of new trouble is slowing: the annualized rate at which balances not yet seriously delinquent crossed 90 days fell to 7.8% in Q2 from 12.9% a year earlier.

CCM read: For ABS this is a scoring story, not a collateral one. Student loans are a small share of securitized consumer collateral, but the borrowers are the same people who hold the cards and auto loans in those trusts. A re-reported default drops a score, and a dropped score reprices the next card or auto origination. The drag on prime-pool composition arrives through underwriting cutoffs, not through student loan ABS.