Word: crediteers
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...rate caps - that is, on the absence of strict usury laws. Why? Almost every state had usury laws in the 1920s, and they were circumvented one by one. Prohibitions against excessive interest started to disappear [South Dakota, for instance, loosened its laws in 1980], and once they did, the credit-card companies recognized a wonderful opportunity. They could charge as much as the market would bear, claiming that they had to charge more for bad credit risks. You can argue that's the democratization of credit, but it's in the interest of credit-card companies to keep people under...
Americans have a long, sordid history with borrowed money. In Collateral Damaged: The Marketing of Consumer Debt to America, Charles Geisst, a professor of finance at Manhattan College, takes us through the centuries to explain how we wound up at our most recent - and spectacular - credit bubble. TIME's Barbara Kiviat spoke with...
...going forward, how do we strike the right balance between the "democratization of credit" and the overextension of debt? We have to go back to the notion of credit basics. In other words, to buy a house, you can't borrow more than, let's say, 2½ times your gross salary. We know the financial institutions are retrenching themselves right now. The question is, Has the consuming public learned anything from this? That's the more difficult issue...
...think the new regulations for credit-card companies will change things? Well, they're going to tighten up some of the shoddy practices the credit-card companies have pulled off in the past. They seem to be taking notice of the GAO's periodic reports about the credit-card companies' practices - you know, misleading statements, using different font types, billing practices, hidden fees. It's going to address most of those issues. My problem with it is it still doesn't address the matter of interest rates. There's got to be a cap, as far as I'm concerned...
...friend of mine who operates a large farming business in California how many of his hundreds of employees are undocumented Mexican immigrants. Ninety percent, he told me. I literally gasped. And such numbers are not unique to agriculture or to California. Just as we are now dependent on cheap credit and cheap manufactured goods from China, we really can't afford to say no to cheap laborers from Mexico and Central America, and we need to admit that truth and make the system for absorbing them rational. At the upper end of the scale, it's crazily self-defeating...