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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   29561 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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Now you have me wracking my brain trying to figure out how I financed my first car. Bought a new 2007 Honda Civic off the lot after I graduated college. Never had a credit card, I'm not sure I was on the utilities, I definitely had been on the rent. My parents didn't cosign the loan. I do remember they made me fax them my college diploma. First and only time that ever happened.

Drove that car until a tree fell on it last year. God I miss it.

But I can easily imagine if I'd been estranged, didn't know who my dad was, just had parents who were financially illiterate/had bad credit(but I repeat), whatever. I would have had to buy a beatermobile, spend as much on mechanical repairs as I did on buying it, and then buy another beatermobile and do the same thing.

Yes, and? This seems on the surface to be implying this is an unfair outcome, but it seems totally reasonable to me. Nobody has to lend anybody money, and credit scores serve an important purpose in being a generally reliable signal that lenders will get their money back. At one point I remember reading part of why they were so reliable was how they were calculated was a trade secret, so that people couldn't game them. I'm not sure this is as true as it once was, with it being open knowledge that credit utilization and payment histories have a huge impact.

Anyways, watching the video, it's full of all the damning by association with non sequitur you'd expect. Credit scores are racist because before they existed banks were racist. Credit scores are racist, because before they existed the personal credit system between business owners didn't include child labor or slave labor. Credit scores are racist because when black neighborhoods become cesspools of crime and dysfunction and their property value tanks, it's hurts their credit score.

I especially love the rhetorical trick they use claiming these non sequiturs actually matter, and repeatedly say "We'll get back to that later". They never do. It's basically full of weasel words and incriminating but irrelevant trivia, exactly what I've come to expect from Vox.

It basically seems like an epistemic attack on what lending even is. Not unlike how health insurance isn't health insurance anymore. It's just the monthly fee you pay to gain access to healthcare cheaper. You can wait until you get sick and then buy some, because nobody can deny you for a pre-existing condition anymore. It takes all the hard work of actuary tables and managing risk and flushes it down the toilet. No wonder costs have spiraled completely out of control and you see companies pulling out of certain markets entirely.

And likewise with lending. When they decide everybody is entitled to sub 5% lending for education, mortgages, automobile loans, etc, I promise you the costs will spiral out of control for everyone. And then everybody will be worse off, and we may find ourselves right back to an objectively worse era of lending by personal reputation.

Then again, knowing the sorts of duplicitous fucks that push these policies, they probably just think it's going to hasten an inevitable communist revolution.

This seems on the surface to be implying this is an unfair outcome, but it seems totally reasonable to me. Nobody has to lend anybody money, and credit scores serve an important purpose in being a generally reliable signal that lenders will get their money back.

The problem is that that the absence of a credit history, instead of meaning something neutral or slightly benign (this person has always been able to afford smaller purchases, so he/ahe should be able to repay this loan), causes the lenders to reject the application. It's obvious that someone who has struggled to repay their loan for a 50" TV is a bad candidate for a mortgage loan, but someone with a blank credit history, but a stable income and no real red flags like arrests shouldn't be considered a risky borrower.

It's obvious that someone who has struggled to repay their loan for a 50" TV is a bad candidate for a mortgage loan, but someone with a blank credit history, but a stable income and no real red flags like arrests shouldn't be considered a risky borrower.

But they are. According the numbers, anyway. And it certainly makes sense that someone who has been borrowing and paying off loans is less of a risk than a similarly situated person who has never borrowed anything.

America doesn't have well-enforced unique identities, so there is a high risk that someone past their early 20's with no credit history has fraudulently adopted a fresh identity in order to conceal their uncreditworthy past. Lenders don't want to touch that with a bargepole.

It is not particularly credible that the bias against people with no credit history is about actual identity theft.

America doesn't have well-enforced unique identities, so there is a high risk that someone past their early 20's with no credit history has fraudulently adopted a fresh identity in order to conceal their uncreditworthy past.

"Please don't deadname me, it's very triggering."

Joking aside, the Tories brought in a bill which would close the loophole of convicted sex offenders being allowed to change their names if the reason they wanted to change their names was because of a newly discovered trans gender identity. Coming out as trans in order to distance yourself from a shameful criminal history is one obvious ulterior motive, but I wonder if anyone's done it for the comparatively milder reason of covering up their history of writing bad cheques and defaulting on their mortgage.

Now you have me wracking my brain trying to figure out how I financed my first car. Bought a new 2007 Honda Civic off the lot after I graduated college.

Depending on the economic environment, dealer financing can be VERY lax.

I interned in finance at Ford. The dirty secret is that nearly-new sales through franchised dealerships are a key part of the business model (effectively as a form of price discrimination between the idiots who happily new prices and the price-sensitive customers who want a new-car quality car but without paying the premium), so a dealer is relatively happy to repo that car in a way a bank isn't. So they care less about creditworthiness as long as you have a down payment that covers the difference between the "new" and "nearly new" valuations.

I would love to read a "how not to get screwed at the dealership" post from someone who interned in finance at Ford. You're in a unique position of being both a noob and an insider and that perspective is pretty rare.

I wouldn't know - partly because Ford corporate try very hard not to know the details of how their dealers are screwing retail car buyers, but mostly because the stuff I did learn about the car market was specific to the UK in my youth.

The core fact about the UK car market in the late 20th century was that most new cars were sold to fleet buyers. The reason for this is that, as long as you drove at least 2,500 business miles a year, you qualified for relatively favourable tax treatment on a company car. For most of my youth, my mum did the school run in my dad's company car while he commuted to work by train - and this was completely normal for the middle class. In order to market to fleet buyers, the list price (dealers normally paid 90% of list as in America) was inflated - making the fleet buyer feel he had got a better deal because he negotiated a 12-15% discount. (The way the cost of the discount was split between corporate and the dealer who handled the face-to-face aspects of the sale was the subject of brutal negotiations, and one of my tasks as an intern was to access the computer system that the middle managers didn't understand and pull a list of all fleet discount disputes that had been outstanding for more than a year, and then walk round the accounts receivables department telling a whole bunch of low-end white-collar drones who were mostly 10 years older than me that if they didn't know how to put an update on the system then they had better let me do it because their grandboss was going to be Noticing in a few days' time.) So in the 1990's UK, "How not to get screwed at the dealership" was basically "Never enter a negotiation where the starting point is the list price." The easiest way to do that was to buy nearly new.

Some of this came up in our antitrust training - there was a competition enquiry going on while I was at Ford about why new car prices excluding tax were higher in the UK than in Continental Europe, and we had to learn what we could and couldn't say about it. The official reason was:

  • We don't update prices instantly in response to exchange rate moves, so there is a temporary effect where the strong pound pushes up UK prices.
  • Manufacturers absorb part of the new car tax, so pre-tax prices were lower in countries with higher taxes. The real reason was the point about fleet buyers.

Actually motteizean AMA posts seem like a really interesting thing we could potentially have on the front page in general.

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