Not being entirely at one with capitalism it did give me a mild frisson when I heard about the guy who took over 150k of his savings out of Northern Rock, allegedly, yesterday! I wonder if that was in used fivers?
No it is not the 'credit crunch' that caught my eye it was 'super crunchers'; people who process a lot of data.
Within the linked article is a nasty little tale.
Ian Ayres, Yale Law School professor, Forbes columnist, and data fanatic, has now written a book on data mining, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart.
Now doesn't that just give you confidence in the ability of the market to screw you and your friends and relations.On determining the presence of racial discrimination in auto loan rates:
While most consumers now know that the sales price of a car can be negotiated, many do not know that auto lenders, such as Ford Motor Credit or GMAC, often give dealers the option of marking up a borrower’s interest rate. When a car buyer works with the dealer to arrange financing, the dealer normally sends the customer’s credit information to a potential lender. The lender then responds with a private message to the dealer that offers a “buy rate” — the interest rate at which the lender is willing to lend. Lenders will often pay a dealer — sometimes thousands of dollars — if the dealer can get the consumer to sign a loan with an inflated interest rate …
In a series of cases that I worked on, African-American borrowers challenged the lenders’ markup policies because they disproportionately harmed minorities. [Vanderbilt economist Mark] Cohen and I found that on average white borrowers paid what amounted to about a $300 markup on their loans, while black borrowers paid almost $700 in markup profits. Moreover, the distribution of markups was highly skewed. Over half of white borrowers paid no markup at all, because they qualified for loans where markups were not allowed. Yet 10 percent of GMAC borrowers paid more than $1,000 in markups and 10 percent of the Nissan customers paid more than a $1,600 markup. These high markup borrowers were disproportionately black. African-Americans were only 8.5 percent of GMAC borrowers, but paid 19.9 percent of the markup profits….
