Mr. Escobar is trolling deep:
Visa and Mastercard have been steadily losing transactions over the past 5 years.
— Pepe Escobar (@RealPepeEscobar) March 10, 2022
Chinese UnionPay began to overtake Mastercard in 2018.
After the "flight from Russia" it will overtake Visa.
Soon Europeans will need Mir-UnionPay to travel outside their impoverished bubble.
UnionPay had already passed Visa and Mastercard 5+ years ago:
Finextra, 22 July 2016
UnionPay takes top spot from Visa in $22 trillion global cards market - RBR
....According to RBR’s Global Payment Cards Data and Forecasts to 2021 study, China’s UnionPay is now the largest scheme in terms of value of card payments, with a 37% share of the $21.6 trillion spent in 2015, up from 32% in 2014, and ahead of Visa (32%) and MasterCard (20%). UnionPay has been the largest scheme for card numbers since 2010 and, by the end of 2015, there were 5.3 billion UnionPay-branded cards, accounting for 41% of the card base worldwide.....
The key difference is that something like 99% of UnionPay's transactions are within China, although with the actions of Visa and Mastercard a lot of merchants in Africa are looking for a replacement or at minimum a backup.
Ditto for Central Asia where Mr. Escobar has made something of a mark for perceptiveness, if not for diplomacy.
