Avast, ye scurvy dogs of the ledger and rats of the retail docks! The winds have shifted, and the scent of gunpowder and fresh-minted doubloons is thick in the air. For too long, the Credit Card Competition Act has been a mere whisper in the galley, a ghost story told to frighten the apprentices of commerce. But now, the merchant galleons have found a most boisterous and golden-maned ally in the Gilded Commodore himself, Donald Trump. The high seas of finance are churning, and the great sea-monsters known as Visa and Mastercard are finally seeing a harpoon aimed straight at their bloated, ink-stained bellies.

For decades, these two leviathans have held a duopoly on swipe fees, siphoning off a pound of flesh from every transaction made from the Tortuga dive bars to the fine silken shops of London. Every time a cabin boy buys a stale biscuit or a captain refits his mast, the Lords of the Admiralty at the big banks take their cut, leaving the honest trader with nothing but a handful of sand and a leaky hull. But with Trump’s heavy boots now stomping on the deck in support of the merchants, the political tides are turning faster than a sloop in a hurricane. It seems the former King of the Tower has decided that the bankers’ toll-booths are a plague upon the free-flowing rum of the economy.

“’Tis a bloody miracle, it is!” shouted Old Barnaby ‘No-Change’ Higgins, a local rum-runner who’s seen more credit denials than he has sunsets. “For years, we’ve been paying the interchange tax like it was a tithe to the Devil himself. If this Act passes, we might actually keep enough gold to patch the sails without selling our firstborn to a Wall Street shark.” Even the high-ranking Admiral of Retail, Lord Benton of the Dry Goods, was seen polishing his cutlass in the town square, declaring that the “stranglehold of the New York counting-houses is finally being pried loose by a hand that knows how to flip a gold coin.”

The banks are howling like dogs caught in the rigging, claiming this will ruin the 'rewards' points they use to lure unsuspecting sailors into their nets. Bah! What use are 'loyalty miles' when you can’t afford the rum? The retail merchant lobby is finally boarding the flagship of the financial elite, and they’ve brought the heavy cannons of populism with them. If Trump’s endorsement holds, the bipartisan crew in the halls of power might just find the spine to vote for a bit of honest competition, forcing the banks to lower their flags and their fees.

Make no mistake, mates, this is a war over transaction fees that will decide who truly rules the ports. Will it be the merchants who sweat and bleed for every sale, or the powdered-wig bankers who sit in their marble fortresses counting their interest while we starve on hardtack? The Gilded Commodore has thrown his lot in with the shopkeepers, and the Kraken is looking nervous for the first time in a century. Keep your powder dry and your wallets tucked close; the battle for the high seas of credit has only just begun, and there’ll be no quarter given until the swipe-tax is sent to Davy Jones’ locker!