Your Credit Score Should Be Based On Your Web History, IMF Says (gizmodo.com) 220
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: In a new blog post for the International Monetary Fund, four researchers presented their findings from a working paper that examines the current relationship between finance and tech as well as its potential future. Gazing into their crystal ball, the researchers see the possibility of using the data from your browsing, search, and purchase history to create a more accurate mechanism for determining the credit rating of an individual or business. They believe that this approach could result in greater lending to borrowers who would potentially be denied by traditional financial institutions. At its heart, the paper is trying to wrestle with the dawning notion that the institutional banking system is facing a serious threat from tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple. The researchers identify two key areas in which this is true: Tech companies have greater access to soft-information, and messaging platforms can take the place of the physical locations that banks rely on for meeting with customers.
The concept of using your web history to inform credit ratings is framed around the notion that lenders rely on hard-data that might obscure the worthiness of a borrower or paint an unnecessarily dire picture during hard times. Citing soft-data points like "the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases" that could be incorporated into evaluating a borrower, the researchers believe that when a lender has a more intimate relationship with the potential client's history, they might be more willing to cut them some slack. [...] But how would all this data be incorporated into credit ratings? Machine learning, of course. It's black boxes all the way down. The researchers acknowledge that there will be privacy and policy concerns related to incorporating this kind of soft-data into credit analysis. And they do little to explain how this might work in practice.
The concept of using your web history to inform credit ratings is framed around the notion that lenders rely on hard-data that might obscure the worthiness of a borrower or paint an unnecessarily dire picture during hard times. Citing soft-data points like "the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases" that could be incorporated into evaluating a borrower, the researchers believe that when a lender has a more intimate relationship with the potential client's history, they might be more willing to cut them some slack. [...] But how would all this data be incorporated into credit ratings? Machine learning, of course. It's black boxes all the way down. The researchers acknowledge that there will be privacy and policy concerns related to incorporating this kind of soft-data into credit analysis. And they do little to explain how this might work in practice.
No, that's China-style Social Score (Score:5, Insightful)
..or whatever they call the judging-you thing over there.
Credit Score should be "Do I pay my bills on time y / n". The rest is nobody's business.
Re:No, that's China-style Social Score (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No, that's China-style Social Score (Score:5, Insightful)
For every you there's probably at least 100, or maybe 1000 that can't, or won't. But I agree, what you're thinking of sounds about what'll have to happen if this develops.
"Mmm mm. What taste this one has in literature.... we'll have to keep an eye on this one for sure." Only a machine will think that line, not a human.
Would that fall under Minitruth or Miniluv?
Miniluv, I think.
Re:No, that's China-style Social Score (Score:5, Interesting)
Programmers can *sell* this service to non-programmers.
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Knowing our ministry competence quarrels, our bureaucracy would ensure our continued freedom.
That would be bank fraud (Score:3, Informative)
Re:That would be bank fraud (Score:5, Interesting)
The day automated browsing becomes a crime is the day clearing your cookies becomes a crime too.
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That's exactly where this sort of nonsense leads. Every time.
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You say that as if you think that's not entirely possible...
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I've been maintaining fake personas online for years. You can buy a burner SIM on eBay for a buck or two, pre-activated, which then gets you accounts on all the major sites.
Some are just to separate out work and personal stuff, some are to prevent doxing and cross-site harassment. If I ever need to show social media history or something like that I've got some extremely boring accounts to produce, well away from the real stuff. Never had to so far but I got worried when the US was talking about it for enter
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
> Hi I'm selling those burner SIMs.
> Now you know why they are so cheap.
> All the best,
> -- FBI
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Just hire someone from abroad to do it.
You'd be surprised how many foreigners just LOVE your country.
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This, as a service.
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For example I just got an amazon card for the 5% rebate on amazon purchases. Is that offer really just dependent on your FICO and not your amazon shopping history?
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"This guy has $2000 worth of Asuka Langley figurines."
"Lower his credit score, everyone knows Rei is better."
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I can just script whatever browsing gets me a higher score
If you know enough to do that, your normal browsing will likely give you a high score.
Using tech sites like Stackoverflow, Github, and even Slashdot correlates with stable income and responsible debt repayments.
TikTok, Instagram, and OnlyFans? Not so much.
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Wouldn't bother me. I can just script whatever browsing gets me a higher score before any credit decisions, and anonymously browse for all my actual browsing. VMs and proxies are easy to set up
That is why even if the researchers' results are totally accurate, any such algorithm would be too easily gamed to be implementable.
"Risk Management", euphemism for Social Credit (Score:4, Insightful)
It wouldn't be the history in your web browser, or anything you have access to directly. The data would come from Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. Some of that could be faked or obscured, but it's a lot more involved than setting up a proxy.
If you want your Amazon orders to be anonymous, you couldn't send them to your house. Maybe set up a P.O. box just for them? But I assume P.O. boxes have to be registered in some way, so that could be cross-referenced to end up in your report. Social media sites and messaging apps are making it impossible to sign up without giving up some identifying information. Typically a working phone number, but sometimes requiring everything up to a government ID if your signup gets flagged as suspicious - like if you give them a Google Voice number, or sign up from a known proxy/VPN IP, or one that could be a proxy, like an IP belonging to a data center or colo.
This isn't rampant speculation either, I used to work for a hosting company that was already doing this 10 years ago. Part of my job was investigating flagged signups, including asking for photo ID. We didn't have access to "Big Data" of course, so it was all cross-checking that the IP address was from a residential IP from the same area as the credit card payment, (etc)... But Big Data is always looking for ways to monetize their horde. Background check & credit reporting companies - increasingly becoming intertwined as "risk management" - would be highly interested in having all this data. Employers, banks, etc would be highly interested in buying it from them.
The only reason the US's privatized Social Credit Score hasn't quite gelled yet, is the suits are still figuring out how to make the most money from it. The technical capacity, the raw data, is already there, collected into a few massive piles. Once a deal's struck between the pilekeepers, it'll be done. The fact that the IMF is now pimping this idea out tells you how seriously it's being pushed.
It won't be just for the US either. The system will be sold internationally, as a competitor to the Chinese social credit system. Note that the US risk management company LexisNexis was kicked out of China in 2017 for refusing the government's request to modify data in their reports. They recognize these products are competitors to their social credit system.
If you think you can avoid it, well, I hope you've never given your real name or number for a social media account, and done only Tor browsing for the last 15 years. Because they didn't start collecting the data today.
Black Mirror's Nosedive (Score:3)
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The credit score also needs to establish how much credit you should be given as well. Generally it seems ineffective at this though, and is based much more on loose collection of information that doesn’t actually say much.
I have no long term or debt history, but have a great payment history at least for the last 15 years. But, in the course of a couple months I checked out a car loan and mortgage, as well as trying to replace a few of my stupidly low limit credit cards with a single high limit card. S
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I'd rather it was more like a criminal record. If I apply for a job I'm asked about convictions in some cases, but never am I asked how many old ladies I helped across the street, how many times I put money in the charity tin, or how many times I bought lunch for a homeless man. If I've never missed a payment, then there is no problem.
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You could free 70% of people from working, give them UBI, and absolutely nothing would change in the economy... except those people being free to actually have the time to start thinking, improve the world, and still do a job if they want to.
Idocracy was just a movie, not something to be desired.
Fuck the IMF (Score:2, Insightful)
No, Fuck 'em.
International money laundering cult designed to funnel money from poor countries back to their neo-colonial masters.
Shove that up your web history, you cunts.
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Precisely this.
Don't forget they also were used to funnel that money to Boris Yeltsin to make him win in that Russian election that the CIA bragged about manipulating in the Washington Post.
You know... Yeltsin... that drunk dancing bear that put Putin in power. Apart from running through Berlin in his underpants.
The IMF is basically what everybody means, when they hatefully say "they".
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The international mafia front.
Let's be honest here, that's basically their reason to exist. When you look at what the IMF does, it's basically waiting like a vulture for a poor country to finally flounder, then dangle a wad of cash in front of their eyes with the choice of either fail completely or basically sell their assets for pennies to foreigners and let them eat the few things that are still valuable like the locusts they are before then letting the country fail completely.
No country in history has be
Soo, they want all our web history? (Score:2)
Surveillance crap aside, how is this even supposed to work? For me, you would have to assemble this from several different computers.
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Just ask the NSA for your credit-worthiness.
Re:Soo, they want all our web history? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think they care how it works, they're info-perverts salivating at the thought of getting every nth degree of info about your life onto their computers. This is a lame attempt at being 10x worse than 1984.
Gov'ts and corporations are insane, they both want every last detail of every moment of everyone's life, for absolute control and for maximum profit.
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What about those of us that browse exclusively in incognito mode?
Re: Soo, they want all our web history? (Score:3)
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Well it dumps my cookies too. I know this because I have to re-enter my fetishes while searching for porn.
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Appropriate sig, if there ever was one. :D
Re: Soo, they want all our web history? (Score:2)
Good. The existing credit sites advise you on actions to take to lift credit, and from my experience closet gay guys often make up a pretty tight cooperative group near the top of many a corporate ladder. I would not want ANY gay porn I view to concealed therefore, and would not be surprised if Credit Karma advised me to look at more, if this strange new IMF world moves foward.
Re: Soo, they want all our web history? (Score:2)
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Surveillance crap aside, how is this even supposed to work? For me, you would have to assemble this from several different computers.
It's kinda nuts. How in the hell are they going to tell anything about me from my browsing history - other than I'm a weird geek. I live on Wikipedia and Slashdot, with forays to Facebook because I have to, and look up various electronic, optical and physics. And some Youtube where I watch Sabine Hossenfelder's Physics, and Scott Manley's rocketry channels.
What's that even have to do with me paying my bills and loans or not?
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Probably means you're a good credit risk. If you were looking at BET tv news then you would be a bad credit risk.
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It's all crap. What they're describing would be the end of even any pretense of privacy. You'd literally be under a microscope all the time. In fact you'd be required to use the Internet, required to have 'social media' accounts, and so on
From December 2020 (Score:5, Informative)
This is hardly new. Both the IMF blog post and Gizmodo article are from December 2020.
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Dicedot editors don't care.
Re:From December 2020 (Score:5, Informative)
And, by the way, it is not the cast the "The IMF Says" this:
The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board, or IMF management.
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Sigh. "not the case..."
it's a free market and free speech (Score:2)
and I can fabricate any web history I wish.
Oh hell no (Score:5, Insightful)
Credit score is supposed to be a measurement of the likelihood that you will pay your debts.
Do they claim to have some sort of data demonstrating a link between that and "the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases"? Or is this about offering lenders something else of value to get them to take bigger risks?
Obviously the worst part of all of this is yet another justification for spying. Is this supposed to use cookies and user agent strings? Cause the bad guys already don't get what they want from me using those.
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And how is that more helpful than just knowing you keep your low-limit credit card maxed out and only make the minimum monthly payment, usually late?
All bankers should wear tracking collars (Score:2)
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It's already a factor in credit decisions. Has been for a few years now.
Admittedly primarily in a fraud and AML context, rather than directly assessing credit risk, but there are online behaviours that can influence a credit score.
Disclosure: Have worked for banks, have worked for a credit reference agency.
type of browser and hardware so use windows or (Score:2)
type of browser and hardware so use windows or get an bad score paid for by MS
Just a sec ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unbelievable. (Score:2)
You had that one hit, 30 years ago. What do you know about finance, IMF?
What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Citing soft-data points like "the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases" that could be incorporated into evaluating a borrower, ...
That's pure crap. My browser, PC hardware and the websites I visit have nothing to do with my credit worthiness. My hardware is old(er) because it gets the job done and I got almost all of it free from friends who were upgrading to new systems. I put more ram and/or an upgraded CPU into some and they're great. Also, I have several systems, running Windows and Linux (also with Windows in a VM). I mostly use Firefox, but sometimes also Chrome and, very occasional, Edge -- mainly for some MS sites. I'm 99% sure I *won't* be "upgrading" to Windows 11 as my systems won't support it -- which will finally force to onto Linux full-time (I've been lazy). Also, I browse a *lot* of sites over the course of a day some for personal interest and some for professional.
Honestly, I can imagine how all that would factor into my credit worthiness. Being debt-free and financially-independent, paying off my CC in full every month (forever) and never missing a payment on anything over my 55+ years should say a lot more than the type of browser and hardware I currently own and websites I read.
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Are you suggesting that your browsing history is not strongly predictive of your browsing history, or do you merely object to the idea of it being determinative?
Re: What? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's pure crap. My browser, PC hardware and the websites I visit have nothing to do with my credit worthiness.
Wrong. It tells them if you're an "average" consumer who fits into their standard credit lrofile or not.
Honestly, I can imagine how all that would factor into my credit worthiness. Being debt-free and financially-independent, paying off my CC in full every month (forever) and never missing a payment on anything over my 55+ years should say a lot more than the type of browser and hardware I currently own and websites I read.
It says that they're probably not going to make much money off of you. But not likely to lose much either. You're worth keeping around as long as they're making profit from your transaction fees, but not worth pursuing or working hard to keep.
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Iphone users might be a better credit risk than Android users.
That probably gives you less information than knowing income would, but you never know unless you look at the data.
And of course, PC is master race.
Already happening (Score:4, Insightful)
B.S. (Score:4, Insightful)
That sounds good except the efficiency we get from that where the banks lose less money doesn't make it down to the trenches where you and I live. The result is that money is just gone from the economy and the banks just pocketed and put it in their giant vault so they can dive into its Scrooge McDuck style. Over time it becomes another item that contributes to our entire economy seizing up because there's no Capital moving in it.
This isn't to say that the solution is to make Banks loan money to deadbeats, rather we should be coming up with ways to get money and capital flowing into our economy whether the banks are going to do it or not (they're not). But the important takeaway is that as Big Data improves efficiency we need to consider what the knock-on effects of these massive increases to efficiency and productivity are going to really mean.
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I can tell you this much the more information the banks have about people the less likely they are to loan money out.
Citation needed. There is both a false positive rate and a false negative rate at work here. Frankly, I doubt that you have the smallest whit of information regarding either. But such is the internet that people love to make definitive statements about matters which they are wholly ignorant.
Banks can take risks because (Score:2)
And again the main problem is that that money would normally be circulating through the economy and now it's going to be locked up in a vault somewhere. Digitally or otherwise.
You're making no sense whatsoever. (Score:2)
That sounds good except the efficiency we get from that where the banks lose less money doesn't make it down to the trenches where you and I live.
If banks losing less money is bad, banks losing more money must be good, and banks losing all their money would be best of all.
The result is that money is just gone from the economy and the banks just pocketed and put it in their giant vault so they can dive into its Scrooge McDuck style.
Yes. That's exactly what they do. And the novelty of diving into a pile of money never wears off.
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It's ok I don't want a loan from the IMF anyway.
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This is nonsense. Banks make money on correctly pricing risk. The better they can understand how risky the investment, the less hedging they need to do on the side of "can't take too much risk".
The obvious exception here is the people who shouldn't get loans at all. The more bank knows about them, the more correctly they price the risk of investing into such people at "too high to be affordable".
For everyone else, the more bank knows about them, as long as their loan request is reasonable and fits their fin
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the credit scores/rankings they give are meant to inform/enable/protect the lenders and have absolutely no care for protecting/helping the borrowing public
I firmly disagree.
Declining to lend money to someone that can't afford to pay it back _is_ protecting them. It's protection that they don't want but it is protecting them.
In the UK it's also the law.
This is all about risk management, not enabling people
People are bad at managing risk. If you want to borrow $30m from me, too fucking right I'm not going to focus on enabling you.
If you want to borrow $30k from me, I'm going to incur risks, and my mitigations for those put you at risk too. I may charge you an unfairly high interest rate, in which case I may get my
Old cartoon (Score:2)
I recall an old Felix the Cat where he was a loan officer and had his dog smell the would be borrower's left shoe to determine credit worthiness. I suspect that was slightly more accurate than some voodoo based on what websites you visited last year.
Internet Explorer users are good marks (Score:2)
Stupidest idea today (Score:2)
"....researchers believe that when a lender has a more intimate relationship with the potential client's history, they might be more willing to cut them some slack..."
Seriously? Have they EVER dealt with a bank or lender, ever? Credit agency? Loan officer?
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Standard indicators: Good credit, lend them money.
Ok, but what if you don't have a good credit history. You've just left school, you rent instead of having a mortgage, you've been sensible and spent from savings instead of incurring debt. You're still someone a bank wants to lend to, but they now need another mechanism to assess risk.
Why wouldn't they explore other things that may at a population level help them understand individuals and whether lending money would be an appropriate interaction?
I'm probably the worst example (Score:2, Interesting)
House has a couple k left until it's paid off. About 5 years early.
Haven't had a car in 7 years.
Don't have any credit cards.
Pay for most things in cash.
Tell me what I need a credit score for?
How would reading slashdot affect your score? (Score:2)
Would it raise it, or lower it???
We were all going to be rich... (Score:2)
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In the 1990s, early 2000s, being a Slashdot reader was predictive of long term success and wealth. The entire future of IT, in ONE website.
FFWD 2021, we're still debating Silverlight vs Flash.
Dude, emacs is the answer.
cash (Score:2)
Cash will be king again.
Keep Finance in Finance (Score:5, Insightful)
One's credit score (as a quantification of the probability of repaying varying levels of debt with minimal complications) should be based on only a few things:
1. History paying bills
2. History paying off debt
3. Current income
4. Variability of recent work history/income
5. Cash on hand
6. Collateral
That handles like 95% of knowable risk. What they're talking about doing is trying to cover another 1-2% of the risk and it's fine for them because a gain is a gain but the cost to the borrower is a ridiculous loss of privacy.
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You're thinking standard case. Now eliminate 1, 2 and 6, understand that many people with regular incomes struggle to demonstrate reliability for 3 and 4 and obviously 5 incurs fraud and other risks.
That's a whole tranche of people that your approach would reject, many of whom are perfectly able to pay back a loan.
Why shouldn't other approaches be used to understand which of them should be extended credit?
(I don't agree with the loss of privacy too, and nobody wanting to lend me money gets my browsing histo
Machine learning will figure it out for us! (Score:2)
The machine will figure out what other lenders you've shopped, so they can figure out how stupid you are. It will figure out how good you are at finding bargains. It will figure out how much time you spend on FaceTwit searching garage sales instead of buying quality new stuff.
Or, maybe not.
That is craptastic idea (Score:2)
Replace physical locations of banks? (Score:2)
Without a bank's physical location, where do I go for a safe deposit box?
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Why is my credit score 6969? (Score:2)
IMF (Score:2)
Yeah, no chance in this happening. (Score:2)
Misleading title, clickbait.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Specifically... (Score:2)
Whether you have criticised the IMF recently.
Your finances all check out (Score:2)
Your income is good, you pay your bills, but must reject you as you liked and retweeted a number of problematic Twitter posts.
Hard data? (Score:3)
Is there hard data to link web usage trends to credit worthiness? I don't see it in the white paper. The only way I see that as a possibly useful link is if your browsing trends include sign-ins to your banking and credit card websites to check on money availability and level of debt (maybe more frequent visits means more attention to debt and therefore more fiscal responsibility?). Even then, that's a real thin, easily broken line.
Would they also like access to the books and magazines I read? My diet? The TV shows I watch? My sleep schedule? I'm betting there are thousands of these types of factors in daily life that loosely correlate with credit score, but that doesn't mean a credit score company is entitled to them. That would make us slaves to those metrics. Want to get a better rate on a loan? Go to a few specific webpages, read some Tolstoy, eat 3 peaches per week and get 5 hours of sleep per night. Also, unfriend that guy you vaguely knew in high school and stop picking your nose. Congratulations! Your credit score went up 10 points!
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How much for the service, can you give me an app to install on my workphone to increase my credit rating?
IMF haven't thought this through.
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Yeah, it's the virtue signallers buying their organic asparagus that you'd lower the credit score for.
Poor people know how to manage a budget, they've had to learn. Middle class people hit hard times and the shit hits the fan.
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Gaming the system would be too easy - borrow an iPhone and a Macbook, set up some new creds on gmail, and browse away. Make some purchases on Amazon, read CNN and NPR, play some relaxation youtube videos, listen to Pandora, and some money related podcast. You're good to go!
You're assuming it would be used for credit monitoring and not political oppression, which would be wrong. It would work exactly as they desire, because if someone has a friend who is politically-objectionable to them, well that person should in their eyes be ostracized from society for that offense.
Re:Credit agencies are classist organiztions (Score:4, Insightful)
I started with 0, I didn't get an inheritance, there was none to begin with. I earned every $ I've saved or spent. I do have credit, and I started that with 0 too, as a lowly E-2 in the military. I wasn't barred from getting credit because I was a no one with no money and a pittance for a salary.
Are you sure you're not confusing things with people that have really bad credit ratings because they've skipped on bills, are always late, etc etc? I've gone through that too, you know -- and after a year or two or three of paying on time, your score recovers. I've lost jobs before. I know the drill. You ever have to pawn something just to make the power bill?
This sounds like something some whackjob professor would teach. That's where you got it from, isn't it. Someone taught you that.
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You seem to have omitted your argument amongst all your personal anecdotes.
Re:Credit agencies are classist organiztions (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that's the experience of myself, and many others around me of various races, "classes" and all that. Don't pay on time, there's consequences. Pay on time, all OK.
My reality may not reflect others -- but -- your reality does not reflect all, either.
oh and it's not just debt that goes into that score -- it's utilities, too. Internet.
Not everything you're taught is true, you know. Just because a college prof tells you it's true, well, that doesn't make it true.
You want boot on neck? Go to Afghanistan, plenty of that to go around now. You keep your eye on it, that's oppression right now. Having to work is not oppression. Having to pay bills is not oppression.
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Do you know who else doesn't have your best interests in mind?
Everyone but your family and friends. And even they will often not have your best interests at heart.
And we do know one person for sure that doesn't have your best interests at heart. That person who taught you the nonsense you're espousing.
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In real life on the other hand, the opposite is true. What banking enables is for those without starting funds to actually gain capital to conduct risky transactions and business that requires investment and come out better in the end. This is why banking once it was invented became what it is today. It's the most efficient way known to humanity to date to enable effective funneling of funds to those who don't have funds, but have a way of investing that allows for net increase of total capital that those w
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No, in other words "Why should anyone lend you money if you've proven you can't be relied on to pay it back?"
Credit ratings are certainly imperfect measures of credit worthiness, but systemtic biases aside, in general if you have a bad rating after being financially active for several years it's because you've proven you're a high risk, and any sane person is unlikely to lend you much money, and will charge you high interest rates if they do so that the expected return on investment is the same. Low chanc
Re:Credit agencies are classist organiztions (Score:5, Interesting)
The rich mainly need credit for convenience. The middle class get themselves in more trouble with credit than without (over extending and constantly deferring the cost of purchases). How do you propose the poor pay off their credit debts? Giving credit to the poor does little good for anyone. The answer isn't to give the poor more opportunity to get deeper in debt. The answer is to provide an economic system that allows those with motivation the opportunity to climb up the economic ladder.
The entire subprime mortgage crisis in the 2000s was caused by the desire to increase minority home ownership. Rules were relaxed so that people with bad credit (and not enough income) could get mortgages for homes they could not afford. It was do-gooders feeling good about themselves mucking with basic economics to the detriment of the entire system. It didn't help that providing a surge of capital to the housing market put demand pressure on inventory and caused prices to rise, leading to even bigger debts for those without the means to pay. We've had a similar issue with the cost of education. The government decided that more people should get cheap financial aid, adding capital in to the market and the price of college has been growing at multiples of inflation. Currently we're seeing too much covid economic stimulus (on top of mortgage deferment, eviction deferment, student loan deferment and generous unemployment benefits all giving people extra money to spend) leading to inflation of common goods. Doing what sounds nice (and fair) often has cascading effects which in the end magnify the original problem being solved.
Re:Credit agencies are classist organiztions (Score:5, Informative)
> The answer is to provide an economic system that allows those with motivation the opportunity to climb up the economic ladder.
That's certainly an extremely important factor - especially when talking about capital, because debt is NOT capital, it only looks like it in passing.
However, home mortgages in particular are a form of debt that converts directly to capital, and is an expense that most people will pay regardless - either you're buying a house for yourself, or you're buying it for your landlord. Very few landlords will rent a home for less than the expected monthly mortgage+maintenance costs, and to refuse to lend money to someone to buy a home comparable to the one they would otherwise be renting is very much a major factor in keeping the lower classes down.
The subprime mortgage crisis was not caused just by a loosening of rules, but an outright flaunting of them - lending agents would routinely encourage people to lie about income on their applications so that they could qualify for much larger mortgages than they could actually afford, knowing full well that those debts would have been packaged and sold to someone else long before the problem became obvious, earning the agent a nice fat bonus and not hurting their bosses at all.
Without such dishonest inflation any talk of an "inventory shortage" is mostly nonsense - people are *already* living in the houses/apartments/condos - the only question is whether they're renting or buying. If more people buy they create a shortage of renters, motivating landlords to sell (or lower rents, driving housing prices down)
Re: Credit agencies are classist organiztions (Score:3)
Stopped reading right there. This Republican propaganda was designed by a think tank to try and distract the conservative half of the population from the fact that these same Republicans were also voting to bail out the banks from their own greed, avarice and stupidity, in a collosal deviation from their stated political positions of non-interventionism in the "Free Market". Nope, dont pay attent
Re: (Score:2)
The government doesn't pay for anything.
Ever.
You do.
Re: (Score:2)
wow, talk about poking a sacred cow, people, wake up ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
That depends. Balls or no balls?