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Notes -
On Credit Scores
I stumbled across this voxplainer on pocket: https://www.vox.com/videos/2023/12/14/24000469/what-does-credit-score-mean, and it reminded me of the Biden admin rule increasing the fees on mortgages to borrowers with good credit(https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3978409-why-is-the-biden-administration-punishing-financially-responsible-homeowners/), and I think that at the time the justification was some kind of racial justice angle. And that in turn led me to think "golly willikers, people are going to start fighting each other over credit scores, might as well get ahead of it on the motte". (If you're not familiar with how credit scores work for some reason, here's an advertisement for a credit scoring company that explains pretty well: https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/credit-education/score-basics/understanding-credit-scores/).
Well not really, I'm not a 50's comic book character. But it seems odd in retrospect that we didn't have a motte discussion in April/May about the change in fee structure, and it seems like there is or is about to be a woke push to try to adjust credit scoring for equity reasons, and this is the kind of boring economic mismanagement that can really jack up the economy if it happens. Now most of the things vox suggests are anodyne if probably stupid and mildly negative, but it's easy to see a jump to government rules getting a whole lot stupider and more destructive; the whole sector is very heavily regulated.
Now a personal story- when I was much younger, I needed to buy a car because the beatermobile I had was broken down and I lived too far from work to walk(and in Tarrant county, there is no public transportation to speak of), and I decided I might as well buy something good that would last a while, even if I had to borrow for it, in lieu of buying another craigslist beatermobile that I'd have to replace in a year or two. I found a good gently used truck online, it was a good deal... and I got denied financing because of lack of credit history. But, my dad put it in his name and told me to get a credit card with a major bank and pay off the full amount on autopay so we didn't have to do that again. I'm still driving that truck and haven't had to spend any money on repairs in five years except new tires(because there was something in the road) and a battery(which was cheap), and I have good credit and don't need my parents to cosign loans. 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. And I wouldn't have been able to buy a house; I'd have been stuck in flophouses or the kind of apartments that don't bother to have an English language application because it's all illegal immigrants. So I can kind of see vox's point- there really are people with generational advantages(I'm one of them), although I don't think most of it is an aftereffect of 50s racism(it's mostly just lack of impulse control) some people get the short end of the stick. Most of them would probably still be behind if we had a level playing field, sure, but we don't- something as simple as "your parents can give good advice" is a major advantage, and it correlates with being the sort of person who would figure out how to have a good credit score anyways, but it's not a perfect correlation.
And for a lot of reasons, people who lack those major advantages are disproportionately black, and this isn't fixable. I happen to hold the belief that we shouldn't try very hard because of omelets, eggs, and the history of ideologically-driven progressive interventions in the economy. Current credit scoring is probably about as fair as can reasonably be expected(which is not perfectly fair). Adding financial literacy classes to high school curricula might be good, but let's be real, the kids who need the instruction aren't learning anyways. I don't think there's much to be done about it, and credit scoring formulae do what they're intended to do, which is accurately reflect creditworthiness.
However, it does not seem to me like people holding the opposite view are obviously delusional the same way as progressive attitudes towards crime are. Some people, through no fault of their own, are bad credit risks, and there really are things that don't get reported to credit agencies which probably should so some people who are good credit risks lack sufficient history for a credit score. And so we can probably expect the "we should do something to make credit scores more equitable" idea to survive the backlash against woke. Vox mentioned multiple states banning the use of credit scores in making insurance decisions; I don't support this, but it's perfectly understandable to me that some people would even if I disagree with them. It seems like this is an underrated aspect of wokeness which will probably survive and where the woke have the potential to do real damage. The Biden admin rule above I don't expect to have good results, but it also seems like something with a pretty minor impact, but which is also the tip of the iceberg. Which raises the question: what else might a woke federal government do to try to hamfistedly improve "equity" in this area?
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.
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.
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:
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Actually motteizean AMA posts seem like a really interesting thing we could potentially have on the front page in general.
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