Consumer Credit and the American Economy
Consumer Credit and the American Economy

Author: Thomas A. Durkin

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 737

ISBN-13: 0195169921

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Consumer Credit and the American Economy examines the economics, behavioral science, sociology, history, institutions, law, and regulation of consumer credit in the United States. After discussing the origins and various kinds of consumer credit available in today's marketplace, this book reviews at some length the long run growth of consumer credit to explore the widely held belief that somehow consumer credit has risen "too fast for too long." It then turns to demand and supply with chapters discussing neoclassical theories of demand, new behavioral economics, and evidence on production costs and why consumer credit might seem expensive compared to some other kinds of credit like government finance. This discussion includes review of the economics of risk management and funding sources, as well discussion of the economic theory of why some people might be limited in their credit search, the phenomenon of credit rationing. This examination includes review of issues of risk management through mathematical methods of borrower screening known as credit scoring and financial market sources of funding for offerings of consumer credit. The book then discusses technological change in credit granting. It examines how modern automated information systems called credit reporting agencies, or more popularly "credit bureaus," reduce the costs of information acquisition and permit greater credit availability at less cost. This discussion is followed by examination of the logical offspring of technology, the ubiquitous credit card that permits consumers access to both payments and credit services worldwide virtually instantly. After a chapter on institutions that have arisen to supply credit to individuals for whom mainstream credit is often unavailable, including "payday loans" and other small dollar sources of loans, discussion turns to legal structure and the regulation of consumer credit. There are separate chapters on the theories behind the two main thrusts of federal regulation to this point, fairness for all and financial disclosure. Following these chapters, there is another on state regulation that has long focused on marketplace access and pricing. Before a final concluding chapter, another chapter focuses on two noncredit marketplace products that are closely related to credit. The first of them, debt protection including credit insurance and other forms of credit protection, is economically a complement. The second product, consumer leasing, is a substitute for credit use in many situations, especially involving acquisition of automobiles. This chapter is followed by a full review of consumer bankruptcy, what happens in the worst of cases when consumers find themselves unable to repay their loans. Because of the importance of consumer credit in consumers' financial affairs, the intended audience includes anyone interested in these issues, not only specialists who spend much of their time focused on them. For this reason, the authors have carefully avoided academic jargon and the mathematics that is the modern language of economics. It also examines the psychological, sociological, historical, and especially legal traditions that go into fully understanding what has led to the demand for consumer credit and to what the markets and institutions that provide these products have become today.

Credit and Debt in an Unequal Society
Credit and Debt in an Unequal Society

Author: Jürgen Schraten

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2020-02-03

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1789206383

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South Africa was one of the first countries in the Global South that established a financialized consumer credit market. This market consolidates rather than alleviates the extreme social inequality within a country. This book investigates the political reasons for adopting an allegedly self-regulating market despite its disastrous effects and identifies the colonialist ideas of property rights as a mainstay of the existing social order. The book addresses sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists and legal scholars interested in the interaction of economy and law in contemporary market societies.

The Economics of Consumer Credit
The Economics of Consumer Credit

Author: Giuseppe Bertola

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 0262026015

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Cross-national analysis of empirical, theoretical, and policy issues in the consumer credit industry, including household debt, credit card usage, and bankruptcy.

Creditworthy
Creditworthy

Author: Josh Lauer

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2017-07-25

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0231544626

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The first consumer credit bureaus appeared in the 1870s and quickly amassed huge archives of deeply personal information. Today, the three leading credit bureaus are among the most powerful institutions in modern life—yet we know almost nothing about them. Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion are multi-billion-dollar corporations that track our movements, spending behavior, and financial status. This data is used to predict our riskiness as borrowers and to judge our trustworthiness and value in a broad array of contexts, from insurance and marketing to employment and housing. In Creditworthy, the first comprehensive history of this crucial American institution, Josh Lauer explores the evolution of credit reporting from its nineteenth-century origins to the rise of the modern consumer data industry. By revealing the sophistication of early credit reporting networks, Creditworthy highlights the leading role that commercial surveillance has played—ahead of state surveillance systems—in monitoring the economic lives of Americans. Lauer charts how credit reporting grew from an industry that relied on personal knowledge of consumers to one that employs sophisticated algorithms to determine a person's trustworthiness. Ultimately, Lauer argues that by converting individual reputations into brief written reports—and, later, credit ratings and credit scores—credit bureaus did something more profound: they invented the modern concept of financial identity. Creditworthy reminds us that creditworthiness is never just about economic "facts." It is fundamentally concerned with—and determines—our social standing as an honest, reliable, profit-generating person.

Consumer Credit Models
Consumer Credit Models

Author: Lyn C. Thomas

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2009-01-29

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0191552496

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The use of credit scoring - the quantitative and statistical techniques to assess the credit risks involved in lending to consumers - has been one of the most successful if unsung applications of mathematics in business for the last fifty years. Now with lenders changing their objectives from minimising defaults to maximising profits, the saturation of the consumer credit market allowing borrowers to be more discriminating in their choice of which loans, mortgages and credit cards to use, and the Basel Accord banking regulations raising the profile of credit scoring within banks there are a number of challenges that require new models that use credit scores as inputs and extensions of the ideas in credit scoring. This book reviews the current methodology and measures used in credit scoring and then looks at the models that can be used to address these new challenges. The first chapter describes what a credit score is and how a scorecard is built which gives credit scores and models how the score is used in the lending decision. The second chapter describes the different ways the quality of a scorecard can be measured and points out how some of these measure the discrimination of the score, some the probability prediction of the score, and some the categorical predictions that are made using the score. The remaining three chapters address how to use risk and response scoring to model the new problems in consumer lending. Chapter three looks at models that assist in deciding how to vary the loan terms made to different potential borrowers depending on their individual characteristics. Risk based pricing is the most common approach being introduced. Chapter four describes how one can use Markov chains and survival analysis to model the dynamics of a borrower's repayment and ordering behaviour . These models allow one to make decisions that maximise the profitability of the borrower to the lender and can be considered as part of a customer relationship management strategy. The last chapter looks at how the new banking regulations in the Basel Accord apply to consumer lending. It develops models that show how they will change the operating decisions used in consumer lending and how their need for stress testing requires the development of new models to assess the credit risk of portfolios of consumer loans rather than a models of the credit risks of individual loans.

Lived Economies of Default
Lived Economies of Default

Author: Joe Deville

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-02-11

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1134087713

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Consumer credit borrowing – using credit cards, store cards and personal loans – is an important and routine part of many of our lives. But what happens when these everyday forms of borrowing go ‘bad’, when people start to default on their loans and when they cannot, or will not, repay? It is this poorly understood, controversial, but central part of both the consumer credit industry and the lived experiences of an increasing number of people that this book explores. Drawing on research from the interior of the debt collections industry, as well as debtors' own accounts and historical research into technologies of lending and collection, it examines precisely how this ever more sophisticated, globally connected market functions. It focuses on the highly intimate techniques used to try and recoup defaulting debts from borrowers, as well as on the collection industry’s relationship with lenders. Joe Deville follows a journey of default, from debtors’ borrowing practices, to the intrusion of collections technologies into their homes and everyday lives, to the collections organisation, to attempts by debtors to seek outside help. In the process he shows how to understand this particular market, we need to understand the central role played within it by emotion and affect. By opening up for scrutiny an area of the economy which is often hidden from view, this book makes a major contribution both to understanding the relationship between emotion and calculation in markets and the role of consumer credit in our societies and economies. This book will be of interest to students, teachers and researchers in a range of fields, including sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, economics and social psychology.

Credit and Consumer Society
Credit and Consumer Society

Author: Dawn Burton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 0415405211

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This title argues that advanced societies have moved towards new modes of sanctioning, delivering and collecting credit that mark the contemporary period as fundamentally different from previous eras.

The Consumer, Credit and Neoliberalism
The Consumer, Credit and Neoliberalism

Author: Christopher Payne

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-07-26

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1136493557

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This book is an investigation into the economic policy formulation and practice of neoliberalism in Britain from the 1950s through to the financial crisis and economic downturn that began in 2007-8. It demonstrates that influential economists, such as F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, authors at key British think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies, and important political figures of the Thatcher and New Labour governments shared a similar conception of the consumer. For neoliberals, the idea that consumers were weak in the face of businesses and large corporations was almost offensive. Instead, consumers were imagined to be sovereign agents in the economy, whose consumption decisions played a central role in the construction of their human capital and in the enabling of their aspirations. Consumption, just like production, came to be viewed as an enterprising and entrepreneurial activity. Consequently, from the early 1980s until the present day, it was felt necessary that banks should have the freedom to meet the borrowing needs of consumers. Credit rationing would be a thing of the past. Just like businesses, consumers and households could use debt to expand their stock of personal assets. By utilizing the method of French philosopher Michel Foucault this book provides an original analysis of the policy ideas and political speeches of key figures in the New Right, in government and at the Bank of England. And it addresses the key question as to why policy-makers both in Britain and the United States did little or nothing to stem rising consumer and household indebtedness, instead always choosing to see increasing house prices and homeownership as a positive to be encouraged.

Consumer Credit Industry
Consumer Credit Industry

Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly

Publisher:

Published: 1967

Total Pages: 824

ISBN-13:

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Examines the operations of the credit insurance industry; its common practices and its competitive effects upon lenders, the economy and the consumer.