Download or read book Consumer Credit and the American Economy written by Thomas A. Durkin and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Financing the American Dream written by Lendol Calder and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once there was a golden age of American thrift, when citizens lived sensibly within their means and worked hard to stay out of debt. The growing availability of credit in this century, however, has brought those days to an end--undermining traditional moral virtues such as prudence, diligence, and the delay of gratification while encouraging reckless consumerism. Or so we commonly believe. In this engaging and thought-provoking book, Lendol Calder shows that this conception of the past is in fact a myth. Calder presents the first book-length social and cultural history of the rise of consumer credit in America. He focuses on the years between 1890 and 1940, when the legal, institutional, and moral bases of today's consumer credit were established, and in an epilogue takes the story up to the present. He draws on a wide variety of sources--including personal diaries and letters, government and business records, newspapers, advertisements, movies, and the words of such figures as Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, and P. T. Barnum--to show that debt has always been with us. He vigorously challenges the idea that consumer credit has eroded traditional values. Instead, he argues, monthly payments have imposed strict, externally reinforced disciplines on consumers, making the culture of consumption less a playground for hedonists than an extension of what Max Weber called the "iron cage" of disciplined rationality and hard work. Throughout, Calder keeps in clear view the human face of credit relations. He re-creates the Dickensian world of nineteenth-century pawnbrokers, takes us into the dingy backstairs offices of loan sharks, into small-town shops and New York department stores, and explains who resorted to which types of credit and why. He also traces the evolving moral status of consumer credit, showing how it changed from a widespread but morally dubious practice into an almost universal and generally accepted practice by World War II. Combining clear, rigorous arguments with a colorful, narrative style, Financing the American Dream will attract a wide range of academic and general readers and change how we understand one of the most important and overlooked aspects of American social and economic life.

Download or read book Creditworthy written by Josh Lauer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-25 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Consumer Credit written by and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Financing the American Consumer written by United States. National Business Council for Consumer Affairs. Sub-Council on Credit and Related Terms of Sale and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book As We Forgive Our Debtors written by Teresa A. Sullivan and published by Beard Books. This book was released on 1999 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bankruptcy in America is a booming business, with hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans filing for bankruptcy each year. Is this dramatic growth a result of mushrooming debt or does it reflect a moral decline that permits the middle class to evade their debts? As We Forgive Our Debtors addresses these questions with hard empirical data drawn from bankruptcy court filings. The authors of this multidisciplinary study describe the law and the statistics in clear, nontechnical language, combining a thorough statistical description of the social and economic position of consumer bankrupts with human portraits of the debtors and creditors whose journeys have ended in bankruptcy court. Book jacket.

Download or read book Consumer Credit in the United States written by United States. National Commission on Consumer Finance and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Consumer Credit Institute of America Inc written by Consumer Credit Institute of America and published by . This book was released on 1936 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Debtor Nation written by Louis Hyman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-03 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of personal debt in modern America Before the twentieth century, personal debt resided on the fringes of the American economy, the province of small-time criminals and struggling merchants. By the end of the century, however, the most profitable corporations and banks in the country lent money to millions of American debtors. How did this happen? The first book to follow the history of personal debt in modern America, Debtor Nation traces the evolution of debt over the course of the twentieth century, following its transformation from fringe to mainstream—thanks to federal policy, financial innovation, and retail competition. How did banks begin making personal loans to consumers during the Great Depression? Why did the government invent mortgage-backed securities? Why was all consumer credit, not just mortgages, tax deductible until 1986? Who invented the credit card? Examining the intersection of government and business in everyday life, Louis Hyman takes the reader behind the scenes of the institutions that made modern lending possible: the halls of Congress, the boardrooms of multinationals, and the back rooms of loan sharks. America's newfound indebtedness resulted not from a culture in decline, but from changes in the larger structure of American capitalism that were created, in part, by the choices of the powerful—choices that made lending money to facilitate consumption more profitable than lending to invest in expanded production. From the origins of car financing to the creation of subprime lending, Debtor Nation presents a nuanced history of consumer credit practices in the United States and shows how little loans became big business.

Download or read book Consumer Lending in France and America written by Gunnar Trumbull and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-11 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "At the beginning of the 20th century, consumer credit in the United States was perceived as unfair and exploitative. Social reformers fought to limit the economic and social impact of small lenders they decried as loan sharks. Reputable businesses steered clear of sales credit because of the questionable consumers that it would attract. By the 1970s, however, credit in America had been reimagined as a legitimate tool of household finance that was understood to have broad social and economic benefits. This transformation in the moral economy of credit accompanied a revolution in lending technologies and the regulatory treatment of consumer credit. Ultimately, these changes allowed American households to amass unprecedented debt -- debt that eventually precipitated the worst financial crisis of postwar America. To understand the origins of that crisis, we need to understand not just the shifting habits of consumers, but also what happened to lenders as the public moved from opposing credit to embracing it. This book traces how that transformation occurred. Nearly all accounts of the origins of American consumer credit have focused exclusively on the U.S. experience. Single-country case studies have their virtues. But they do not allow the observer easily to differentiate what is unusual about the U.S. case from what is common even to countries with very different credit practices"--

Download or read book Financing the American Dream written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once there was a golden age of American thrift, when citizens lived sensibly within their means and worked hard to stay out of debt. The growing availability of credit in this century, however, has brought those days to an end--undermining traditional moral virtues such as prudence, diligence, and the delay of gratification while encouraging reckless consumerism. Or so we commonly believe. In this engaging and thought-provoking book, Lendol Calder shows that this conception of the past is in fact a myth. Calder presents the first book-length social and cultural history of the rise of consumer credit in America. He focuses on the years between 1890 and 1940, when the legal, institutional, and moral bases of today's consumer credit were established, and in an epilogue takes the story up to the present. He draws on a wide variety of sources--including personal diaries and letters, government and business records, newspapers, advertisements, movies, and the words of such figures as Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, and P.T. Barnum--to show that debt has always been with us. He vigorously challenges the idea that consumer credit has eroded traditional values. Instead, he argues, monthly payments have imposed strict, externally reinforced disciplines on consumers, making the culture of consumption less a playground for hedonists than an extension of what Max Weber called the "iron cage" of disciplined rationality and hard work. Throughout, Calder keeps in clear view the human face of credit relations. He re-creates the Dickensian world of nineteenth-century pawnbrokers, takes us into the dingy backstairs offices of loan sharks, into small-town shops and New York department stores, and explains who resorted to which types of credit and why. He also traces the evolving moral status of consumer credit, showing how it changed from a widespread but morally dubious practice into an almost universal and generally accepted practice by World War II. Combining clear, rigorous arguments with a colorful, narrative style, Financing the American Dream will attract a wide range of academic and general readers and change how we understand one of the most important and overlooked aspects of American social and economic life.

Download or read book It s in the Cards written by Lloyd Klein and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1999-12-30 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first comprehensive account of the development of consumer credit. Consumer credit is a vital force driving the development of our economic system. Rather than look at consumer credit solely as an economic phenomenon, Klein examines the social impact of the consumer credit industry within the framework of economic and cultural change. His analysis offers a concise examination of the industry from the perspective of marketing, the creating of material and experiential products, and the product distribution mechanisms. The discussion of changes within the bankruptcy structure accounts for the creation of overzealous consumer spending and the implementation of controls over individual consumer credit. This will be of interest to scholars or students concentrating in economic sociology, stratification, and cultural studies.

Download or read book Financing the American Consumer Summary report pt 2 Committee reports written by United States. National Business Council for Consumer Affairs. Sub-Council on Credit and Related Terms of Sale and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Consumer Lending written by Richard E. Beck (Jr.) and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Credit Card Practices written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Financial Services. Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Consumer Credit in the United States written by D. Marron and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-11-23 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is commonly imagined that in recent years the rampant growth of consumer credit has lured American consumers into a crippling state of indebtedness, a state that has upended old cultural values of Puritan thrift and stimulated a frenzy of consumption. Drawing on the sociological concept of government and informed by a historical perspective, Marron presents a much more complex and nuanced reality. From its early antecedents in nineteenth century salary lending and instalment selling, she shows how the emergence and growth of consumer credit in the United States have always been subject to shifting regimes of control and regulation.

Download or read book Consumer Credit in America written by Pamela Foohey and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: