I'm amazed these events don't seem to shake the american love for credit cards.
Like now you've seen what happens in the extra layers between you and the money, I wish people would go back on the poison pill and maybe switch to debit cards.
Credit cards are great because if someone steals mine and makes fraudulent charges, they're stealing Chase's money, not mine.
(In theory if someone steals money through your debit card you can get it back... in theory. I'd like to avoid ever having to find out how well this works in practice).
For which priviledge Chase charges you something obscene. The process post-theft on a debit card is not as scary as you seem to think it is, but that may be a EU vs US rather than credit vs debit thing.
Chase isn't charging me anything for the privilege. I have two credit cards with them -- one with a $0 fee and the other with a $450 yearly fee (but on which I earn way more than $450 in rewards points a year so it washes out).
They charge interest, but you don't pay any interest if you settle the full balance every month, which I always do.
I'm sure the maths work out at an individual level, but have you considered the effect on pricing being a debit-first society would have?
Most merchants/payment processors include a premium for handling the edge cases that arise from credit-linked misbehaviour. In the same way you sometimes get a cash discount, removing the merchant/provider protections should show up in your wallet as a good (and surprisingly high) surprise.
As I understand it (please correct me), the party who gains for the furtherance of this agenda is the financial service sector who has another opportunity to insert marginal fees and more importantly, a direct access to your transactions without necessarily having the same fiduciary duty or alignement of goals than a bank teller/account manager would have.
