Buy European

The Chinese jokingly call Trump "Comrade Jianguo", because of how his trade war has made China become more independent and stopped relying as much on American companies.

In the same way Trump's latest tantrum seems to be good for the Europe.

That's the Trump bump! And it's only been eight weeks.

Or is it hump 🤔?

Canada shares a land border with Denmark and a maritime border with France.

I think that is sufficient to include them in any extended EU schemes.

(To the degree that they want it, of course)

Yay GNU Taler is very promising, but I fear banks prefer proprietary systems.

It may become widely used if there's strong customer demand for GNU Taler, or regulation requiring an open electronic wallet. Most banks would probably be dragging their feet.

It has been a while since this appeared; I wonder if it picks up steam. Now or never?

Is it? Doesn't look like they offer debit/credit cards.

Looks more like a PayPal alternative.

Samsung have their own wallet app, too. There are also a number of alternatives to Visa and Mastercard, but unfortunately, they are not as widespread or are limited to a particular countries banking system. In Canada, we have Interac, for example.

Yeah, that is what happened to DLSite. It sells Japanese media such as hentai, so Visa & Mastercard put a universal ban on their products, no matter the category. It is a 1st Amendment violation IMO, since they are gatekeeping an entire culture.

I can easily see MasterVisa banning European or Canadian merchants for the sake of a Trump Regime.

You could solve half of it by getting a Wise account which comes with both a real USD routing number as well as an European IBAN. You can keep your money as euros and do card payments in USD or any other currency with better rates than a normal European bank account would give you

HOWEVER

The Wise debit card is still a VISA one.

I'm Portuguese and also lived in other countries in Europe and Multibanco is a vastly superior system to everything else I've seen, but on the ATM side rather than the payments side (everybody seems to have their own payment solution or, like the UK, rely on the likes of Visa and MasterCard) - already back in the 90s in Portuguese ATMs, in addition to withdrawing money, you could check your bank account balance, get a statement with the last transactions on your account and even pay your bills all this well before widespread internet access and online banking: that stuff was way ahead of its time back then.

Right now they've added stuff like touchless mobile payments and transfers, but the rest has caught up with them so you'll find such solutions in most countries plus that whole system is entirely local as it's the product of ages ago (before neoliberalism) the government forcing the banks to get together and create a company - SIBS - under shared ownership of the banks, responsible for setting up and managing a national interbank payment systems.

I wouod even say that the Multibanco system probably helps Portuguese banks maintain market lock-in against external competitors, which does get translated to Portugal having pretty high banking fees compared to the rest of Europe, especially for one of the poorest countries in the EU.

Get out of here Charlie P