Debt collectors are the true ancestors of Facebook’s emotions experiment (original) (raw)

Congress Protected the Troops-Can the New CFPB Protect Civilians from Payday Lending

In 2007, Congress enacted a law, commonly referred to as the Military Lending Act (MLA), which placed a 36% interest rate cap on several consumer loans, including payday loans, and prohibits lenders from engaging in several practices considered predatory. However, the MLA grants these protections only to active-duty military members and their dependent family members. In the wake of the mortgage foreclosure crisis. Congress passed and President Obama signed into law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (Dodd-Frank Act), which creates a new federal agency, the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (CFPB), to focus on protecting consumers in the credit market place. In this Article, I assert that the newly-created CFPB should use its authority to afford to ordinary Americans protections similar to those now enjoyed exclusively by military families. To support my assertion, I describe how payday loans entrap civilian Americans in a cycle of indebtedness just like they once ensnared military families and yet both groups are equally lacking in financial sophistication.

Digital Subprime: Tracking the Credit Trackers

The Sociology of Debt, 2019

This chapter introduces a phenomenon I call 'digital subprime'. This is a domain that represents a rapidly developing frontier in lenders' quest for predictive power involving a growing group of well-funded technology startups who are entering subprime, payday lending markets in various different countries and are lending at high rates of interest to borrowers who often have either poor credit histories or, in some cases, no credit histories at all. In this new variant of consumer credit lending, we see the exploitation of diverse forms of online data, processed through forms of algorithmic analysis, in the attempt to better predict the repayment behaviour of individuals. This data often appears extremely mundane and to have very little to do with the credit product in hand. Data points can range from a user's IP (Internet Protocol) address, to the particular browser they use, to their screen resolution, to information accessed via social media accounts. In examining this new economic phenomenon, the paper presents results from a project that uses digital methods to try to track the trackers being deployed. The chapter seeks to map the terrain of possibility represented by the diverse forms of data that are rendered accessible to lenders, partly as a basis for future research, and partly to highlight key developments in the present and future ontologies of money.

The market will have you: The arts of market attachment in a digital economy

Markets and the Arts of Attachment, 2017

What might it mean to say that the market will have you? This chapter tackles this question by using Gabriel Tarde’s central provocation that what we are, our identities, are not matters of ‘being’ but of ‘having’. The art of markets lies in how this having – of data, relations, associations, ties, ‘us’ – is practically accomplished. We test this idea by looking at how marketing conversations have been conducted in two consumer finance product cases: the industrial life assurance company Prudential Assurance and the payday loan company Wonga. These two cases, we argue, shed new light both on how we understand market attachment and what this might mean in a rapidly evolving digital economy.

'In a perfect world it would be great if they didn't exist': How Australians experience payday loans

In the last few decades, payday lending has mushroomed in many developed countries. The arguments for and against an industry which provides small, short-term loans at very high interest rates have also blossomed. This article presents findings from an Australian study to contribute to the international policy and practice debate about a sector which orients to those on a low income. At the heart of this debate lies a conundrum: Borrowing from payday lenders exacerbates poverty, yet many low-income households rely on these loans. We argue that the key problem is the restricted framework within which the debate currently oscillates.

Consumer credit default and collections: the shifting ontologies of market attachment

Consumption Markets and Culture, 2014

Existing accounts of consumer credit market making have done much to explore the business models, technologies and advertising practices of lenders, and the financial circumstances of borrowers. However, the space of interface between consumer credit debtor and debt collector remains underexplored. Drawing on interviews with debtors and an exposition of debt collections technologies, the paper demonstrates how this market domain, in seeking to prompt calculative engagement, depends on its ability to intersect successfully with the everyday lives of economic agents. Critically engaging with key currents emerging out of the ‘economization’ programme it builds on its attention to the socio-material mechanisms of market making. However, the paper argues that materially sensitive economic sociologies need to account more thoroughly for the place of affect in markets. This is particularly relevant when studying consumer markets, where exchanges routinely centre on intimate and embodied encounters between economic actors.

Digital Debt Management: The Everyday Life of Austerity

New Formations, 2016

The age of austerity has seen large swathes of society adversely affected by ever-harsher austerity measures and protracted economic stagnation. This is compounded by the increasing routinisation of debt default and the everyday management of problematic levels of debt. This paper explores the everyday politics of indebtedness—the multifaceted ways in which household debt is transforming debtors' lives—and the forms of resistance it can give rise to. In particular we focus on the role played in the UK by online resources as a new and increasingly important source of expertise and collaborative support. The paper's object is a set of web forums that offer platforms for peer-to-peer (p2p) information exchange, specifically: Consumer Action Group, Money Saving Expert, Mumsnet. We analyse the types of expertise that are made available, how this is discussed and achieves legitimacy (or not), as well as the forums' effects on forms of domestic accounting. We also compare the online forms of debt advice to conventional 'real world' debt management expertise. We conclude by considering how this enhances our understanding of the transformative impact of digital technologies on indebtedness as well as offering insights into the everyday life of contemporary austerity.

CONSUMER DEBT STRESS, CHANGES IN HOUSEHOLD DEBT, AND THE GREAT RECESSION

This research examines psychological debt stress and changes in household debt holdings for consumers during the Great Recession using data from a monthly national U.S. household survey covering the period 2006 through 2012. Debt stress measures in the population rose by over 50% at the bottom of the recession. Determining relative stress for eight different types of household debt, we find that noncollateralized debts are more stressful than collateralized debt and that during the recession the composition of debt shifted away from collateralized debt and toward noncollateralized. Our empirical results show that women and Hispanics experienced higher measured levels of stress. (JEL D12, D18)