Credit and Debit Cards and How They Work (Essay Sample)

Credit and Debit cards
* In the beginning, trade was difficult to conduct. Initially, people used to exchange goods and services and could use currencies such as cowrie shells, bronze, and copper.
* However, with the emerging of credit cards to be used in trading, the whole process was made convenient and easy to conduct.
*  From history, the process of conducting business using valueless devices have been in existence for over 5000 years, when people from Mesopotamia used clay tablets to conduct trade.
*  It was a convenient method in that era that surpassed other methods such as melting of copper.
*  As time went by in the 1800s, merchants influenced the life of farmers by using credit coins for credit facilities.
* Much embracing of credit one by us department of stores and oil companies happened in the 1900s. This further paved way for greater discoveries in that section.
* In 1958, the bank of America become the first to obtain licensed credit card nationally for general purposes.
* 1959. The first plastic card was unveiled by the American Express.  It created the American Express charge card that necessitated payments to be done in totality in the last days of the month.
* In 1966, Californian banks came up with master cards, which is a form of a credit card. To have a controlled use of credit cards, several regulations were put across(CreditCards.com, 2017). 
* In 1970, an act of fair credit reporting restricted the collection of report data while a similar act in 1974 prohibited lenders from discriminating people because of race, gender, marital status, national origin or religion.
* 1981. The Rewards program was developed. The first company to apply this program was American Airlines to those who flew many times (Garcia, 1980).
* 1986. Discover is launched at the super bowl XX. This was a credit card that would perform various tasks like bonuses at the close of every year depending on the user’s expenditures.
*  Another advancement that took place was the introduction of the magnetic stripe by IBM, which is a technological advancement.Stock Market
* The stock market is believed to have come into existence at around 1500s.
*  Earlier merchants of Venice conducted trading on behalf of the government in Italy. The very first world stock market trading is linked with Belgium.
* However, the first world stock market was at a place known as Antwerp.
*  These stocks were different from the current stocks in the sense that there were no companies involved but rather conducted affairs of the government(Poitras, n.d.) .
 East India Company was the first company to trade in 1602 and traded at Amsterdam stock exchange.   In 1801, London stock exchange was formed.
 In America, Philadelphia stocks exchange was the first in America. Nevertheless, New York stocks exchange was established in 1817, which b