Who doesn't like lower credit card interest rates? Well, banks. I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. This week,

we started to get quarterly profit reports. As is tradition, banks are early in that lineup, and profits

have generally been great this week. But within that industry, there's concern about President Trump's

plan to try to cap credit card interest rates at 10% if they were to get through Congress.

Christopher Lowe is chief economist at FHN Financial.

Here's the deal, right? Most credit card interest rates are over 20%, which is remarkably high compared to other interest rates.

The reason is it's an unsecured loan. If you ultimately find you can't pay, you can walk away from it.

That comes with penalties, of course, but from a bank's perspective, it's still money lent and lost.

The way they cover those losses is by charging everybody these extraordinarily high interest rates,

even good borrowers pay over 20%.

High-risk borrowers, well, they pay the highest rates. If the rate is capped at 10,

banks simply won't be able to cover their losses. Delinquencies on credit cards are running at

about 12.5%. The map doesn't work. And as a result, for many people, what they'll find is the lowest interest rate

is zero, because that's what you pay when you don't have a card. By the way, we should stipulate.

This is not going to sail through a Republican-led Congress. There are lobbyists for banks with friends in Congress, and it's going

to be a vigorous discussion. Oh, no, that's absolutely right. And also, traditionally,

Republicans don't much like price controls, which is basically what this is. I don't think it will

sail through, but it is an astonishing thing

coming from a Republican president. It's the kind of suggestion we expect to hear from

people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. But populism these days, it's a two-party process. All right, or at least the

rhetoric of populism at a time in which the key word affordability is front and center. Chris Lowe,

chief economist at FHN Financial. Thank you. Thank you, David. The White House and the governors of some mid-Atlantic states today are expected to announce a plan to cap energy prices by, in effect, making power-hungry tech companies shoulder the cost of new power plants.

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