Part of the Amex calculation will be about having direct marketing access to high earning customers - the card offers are not provided out of the kindness of their hearts, they are co-marketing deals with usually quite high end high margin retailers.

Similarly Amex will take a cut of the BA spend at the 3 avios rate.The fee is also part of the equation, £195 equates to 19,500 avios, so well over the £10k spend at the 1.5 rate. If someone is just spending £10K on the card to get the 241, then they are also mostly buying the avios at above cost and Amex pocket the transaction fees. It starts becoming more interesting when spend is well beyond £10K, but at that point the individual is high net worth probably and there are other means of getting a payback as discussed.

A 241 needs significant flying spend to be really valuable, and anyway the number of "free" avios generated by this is on the redemption side and nothing to do with Amex, so that will be a cost mostly borne by BA. You can't charge Amex for 140,000 avios because someone has had 15K avios and a 241 on credit card spend and combined them with another 125k to do a redemption.

And of course some people pay interest on credit card debt. Stupid, but true. And God bless these simpletons, I say, because they subsidise everyone else at 22.2% APR or whatever mad amount it is.

We've also seen fees increasing overnight, benefits curtailed, and churning stopped. Expect more of this on other cards.

Having said all this, the writing is absolutely on the wall for extra-curricular earnings, and a couple of years ago the equation was far better for Amex. This isn't bad news, as ultimately everyone pays for these points in terms of higher costs, and the EU rules are very good for consumers. As with any arbitrage opportunity, count on it disappearing tomorrow and max it out today.