Visa IPO is a success... or is it?

I had no clue that Visa was 1) not already a publicly traded company, and 2) that they were going to become a publicly traded company today, however; apparently they are and they did. According to the Financial Times article about Visa's record-breaking IPO today, the strong performance of Visa's business helped propel them to a $56B+ market cap, but is this good for the economy in the long run?

My concern with Visa's IPO is that the many institutional investors and banks which are already having problems with their poor choices in the mortgage industry are now tied more tightly to the poor choices of so many individuals who utilize credit cards. Credit cards are good for the avoidance of risk and the simplification of payments to merchants for the discerning consumer, but for many consumers credit cards represent a black hole of debt. As of 2007, Visa represented a 54% market share of all credit cards. I think this is a problem because credit cards are a form of unsecured debt, and the mortgage crisis in America is already causing many banks to tighten their belts and charge higher rates for the credit they provide to consumers. Because credit cards are unsecured, this means that banks will likely experience a long-term tightening of the belt by Visa, which will in turn be passed on to consumers. Why will Visa "tighten the belt"? Because their investors will now have the increased expectations of continued positive profits every year (despite temporary economic downturns), and this will show itself in increased fees to merchants and banks for the processing of credit card transactions.

Certainly I don't have all of the answers in this matter, and even less of the facts about how this will all play out on the macro-economic scale of the American economy, but I think there is real risk here. Risk that is an even more unstable type of risk than merely poor mortgage lending practices in real estate. Corrections on the pricing of housing and the interest rates on home loans are easier for bankers to adjust than merely numbers on spreadsheets to reflect the risk of consumer behaviors with credit cards, ESPECIALLY in a volatile down-turn market that is already full of risk.