Amazon, Visa reach payment agreement

Amazon.com has agreed to accept Visa’s cards across its global network, settling a feud that threatened to damage the financial giant’s business and disrupt e-commerce payments.

The agreement, announced by both companies, resolves a dispute that at one point spurred Amazon to consider a ban on U.K.-issued Visa credit cards.

The retailer said it will no longer charge customers who use Visa cards on its site in Singapore and Australia an extra fee and won’t turn off Visa credit cards from amazon.co.uk.

“We’ve recently reached a global agreement with Visa that allows all customers to continue using their Visa credit cards in our stores,” a company spokesman said via email. “Amazon remains committed to offering customers a payment experience that is convenient and offers choice.”

Amazon had considered shifting its popular co-brand credit card to Mastercard Inc., Bloomberg News has reported.

The Amazon card is one of the industry’s largest co-branded portfolios, and the company used talks to renew the agreement as a way to secure better terms from Visa, according to people familiar with the matter.

Retailers have long balked at the fees they pay each time a consumer swipes a card at checkout.

While it can amount to just pennies per purchase, that adds up: Merchants spent a whopping $110 billion in card-processing fees in 2020 alone.

For the biggest banks and merchants, Visa often reaches special pricing agreements to persuade them to send more volume over its network.

The company set aside $8.4 billion in fiscal 2021 for such incentives, 26% more than a year earlier.

Walmart exceeds quarterly profit expectations

NEW YORK – Walmart muscled through rising inflation, a snarled global supply chain and surging costs related to COVID-19 sick leave among its workers to deliver strong fourth quarter results Thursday.

The nation’s largest retailer, based in Bentonville, Arkansas, also delivered on Thursday an upbeat outlook for this year and boosted its dividend.

Shares rose more than 2% in late-morning trading.

Walmart is the first major retailer to report fourth-quarter fiscal results, which include the critical holiday shopping period, and is considered a major barometer of spending given its size so analysts carefully parse through the data.

Walmart executives said that its shoppers are still in good financial shape, and they don’t see any major changes in consumer behavior patterns like trading down to cheaper labels, but they’re paying close attention to higher prices.

It also expects supply chain issues to ease in coming months.The report from Walmart came one day after the Commerce Department said that retail sales in the U.S. jumped a surprisingly strong 3.8% from December to January.

And although inflation – which has reached the highest level in four decades in the U.S. – helped boost that figure, most of January’s gain reflected more purchases, not higher prices.

Like other retailers, Walmart faces rising costs for everything from labor to shipping as supply chain backups hit companies worldwide during the holidays. As the nation’s largest food seller, it’s also more vulnerable to rising food prices.

This past holiday quarter also offered an extra challenge: a contagious new variant, omicron, that forced many workers to take sick leave, resulting in surging costs for companies having to hire more workers beyond what was planned to fill that gap.

In fact, Walmart said the latest quarter’s peak in COVID leave was higher than anything it experienced in all of 2021 or 2020.

But Walmart used its clout to muscle through the big challenges by chartering vessels for its goods as it moved into the holiday shipping crunch.

As for managing inflation, it said it’s using years of expertise from monitoring surging prices in other parts of the world like Mexico and parts of South America where it does business.

Saudi Arabia declines to pump more oil

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – Saudi Arabia is signaling it isn’t willing to pump more oil and won’t push for changes to an agreement with Russia and other producers that has kept a lid on oil production levels.

This has Washington concerned as gasoline prices rise and tensions with Russia over Ukraine fuel market uncertainty.

The Biden administration dispatched Brett McGurk, the National Security Council’s Middle East coordinator, and the State Department’s energy envoy, Amos Hochstein, to Riyadh on Wednesday to talk about a range of issues – chief among them the ongoing war in Yemen and global energy supplies.

Asked by reporters in Washington whether the U.S. officials were also urging Saudi Arabia to pump more crude to alleviate high oil prices, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said she did not have more details on the meeting.

A White House official said the two U.S. officials had not asked the Saudis to increase oil production at their meetings in Riyadh. The person insisted on anonymity to discuss the meetings and said the conversation involved regional issues and energy security impacts on the global economy.

Two Saudi officials told the Associated Press the Saudi energy minister informed the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, of the kingdom’s commitment to the group’s current road map of cautious monthly increases.

They spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to brief journalists.

King Salman also said as much in a call last week with President Joe Biden.

According to a Saudi readout of the call, the king highlighted the “the importance of maintaining the agreement” that is in place between OPEC, the oil cartel led by Saudi, and Russia.

The Saudi and Russian-led alliance, known as OPEC+, calls for gradual increases to oil production as the world continues to emerge from the pandemic, but geopolitical events have been rapidly evolving and driving market volatility.

Higher prices at the pump pose a threat to Democrats at the polls in upcoming midterm elections.

Biden has warned that gas prices could rise even higher if Russian President Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine.

Benchmark crude is trading at around $95 a barrel, its highest level in eight years. AAA says the current U.S. national average for a gallon of regular gasoline costs around $3.50 – a 40% increase from its average of $2.50 at this time last year.

From wire reports

During a CNN forum in October, Biden said prices were rising because “of the supply being withheld by OPEC.”

He said that while there’s a lot of negotiation going on about the cost of gas, “there’s a lot of Middle Eastern folks who want to talk to me.”