Things aren't getting any better. Metaphorically though:

"A patient in pain, facing death, will pay more for the cure than they would have before they believed they had the disease" - Dr Procter.

"What disease, what pain?" you ask.  "It still cost them less than replacing the cards."

He's still going to get sick again, he's just in remission at the moment.

TJX wouldn't be the only merchants looking to offload that risk. They were described as having too much information about cardholders, compounding the potential for damage, true, but the hacker was primarily there for the card data, the rest was a bonus.

There's the easy way and the hard way, what'll it be? I have a feeling there will be some consumer and government input here. What was the critical mass in Northern Rock's case, when is critical mass reached during loss of trust? What has to happen?

Mastercard and Visa have an opportunity here and will they choose the same or different paths? As brands only - they are particularly susceptible to changes in consumer confidence.

"Businesses that have few physical assets are particularly susceptible to changes of consumer preferences and investor confidence. New markets for new services can quickly be overtaken by yet more imaginative offerings and the fast pace of technology change demands continued high investments in the latest technologies anyway.
 This has been well illustrated by recent stock market volatility - is e-commerce just the "froth on the daydream" or is there a deeper crisis in the underlying technology developements?"

                                                                      - Peter Johnston

             From P211 of  Horst Siebert Economic Policy Issues of the New Economy 2002

Preferences and confidence may be switched and substitue m-commerce for e-commerce....

The Biggest Missed Opportunity?

Johnston's words are just as applicable today as then even though he was referring to mobile phone and internet services at a time Nokia was predicting numbers to reach 1 billion mobile users in 2002. (now 3B+ and up 900 million more this year). I don't suppose the card issuers signed up that many lately have they?

I'd say when we look at this with historical perspective we might conclude that the mobile phone has already been the biggest missed opportunity that banks have ever squandered.

The section in the book is titled - The Network Is The New Paradigm.
Not quite - ID is because it is essential infrastructure for almost every successful interaction even when using a mobile.

The next section of the book is titled It's the Size of The Network That Matters 

Apply all of above to financial networks that get pretty small when consumers stick to cash or even just not your (m)cash. Mobilisation...

History is fun. Unless you are.