National Credit Reporting

[nancylebov]

dcseain mentioned to me that in Germany, national credit reporting is illegal. A fast googling didn't turn up much except that Germany and some other European countries have very strict privacy laws because the Nazis used government records to track down Jews and other people targetted for genocide. (I suspect you could put together an interesting book about the aftereffects of the third reich.)

In Germany, credit gets extended much more by feel and by knowing people, I think. This has some obvious problems (what if you don't have social connections? or social skills that look good in an interview with a banker?), but the US system of national credit bureaus is so hopelessly sloppy that it isn't obviously better and may well be a great deal worse.

I'm not sure that there's a financially effective way of running a meticulous national credit bureau. I've speculated about religious people who take the ninth commandment (against bearing false witness) seriously running such a bureau as a non-profit, but I'm not sure it's legally or economically feasible and anyway, no one's lining up for the job.

Considering how much noise there is in national credit reports, it's surprising that they're taken so seriously, but (sorry no cite) there's evidence that people get very attached to the only fact they've got about a subject.

Addendum:: the tendency to be over-attached to insufficient information is called anchoring.

Comments

[tashadandelion.livejournal.com]

The opacity and power of the big three credit report agencies (cabals?) in America amazes me. We Americans get periodically up in arms over many indignities and dangers put upon us by the higher-ups, but I'm surprised how willingly we submit to the tyranny of those reports.

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

Conversely, tax records in Norway are public information (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4318382.stm). Everyone knows what everyone else makes.

[madfilkentist]

Some collection agencies are, for all practical purposes, extortion operations which demand payment of nonexistent debts under threat of making your credit rating bad. They don't get shut down. That says something is seriously wrong with credit reporting.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I wonder how that works out generally-- not just for the wealthiest, but inside organizations where everyone knows everyone else's salary.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

(I suspect you could put together an interesting book about the aftereffects of the third reich.)

It's certainly had interesting effects on my profession, videogames. On the one hand, it provides one of the most popular antagonist types ever; practically no one feels guilty about shooting Nazis. On the other hand, with Germany itself such a big market for videogames, their laws against Nazi imagery mean that you almost never see *actual* Nazis in games; just lots of German soldiers with Iron Cross imagery.

[thette.livejournal.com]

It just does. You can look everyone up, but only real snoops do. (My best friend back in elementary school had parents who did this.) It's not particularly classy, but there's not a social taboo against it.

[richardthe23rd.livejournal.com]

Even though I've always paid by JC Penney bill on time, they closed my account, probably because I sacrificed so many other accounts to make sure I could pay theirs. It might also have helped that I tended to pay the bill in person at the store as close to the deadline as I could manage, since the deadline was generally right on my payday, and their system was slow enough that my bill would generally show a missed payment and a late fee, which they would have to back out once they realized I'd paid on time. Those "late" payments probably counted against me even though every time they had to acknowledge it was their mistake.

So, yeah.