Equifax removed the $125 claim payout option after millions submitted claims

I hope I have bought enough street cred to say the following by ghostwriting hundreds of letters to the credit reporting agencies to fix their problems, which are numerous and essentially inevitable given their model and present operations.

Credit scores are important because they allow banks to do standardized, automated underwriting for effectively free at 2 AM in the morning, which is what makes credit abundantly available in the United States and one of the reasons why it is so cheap to the middle class. (This routinely escapes the notice of people in the middle class, but the ordinary operation of banks is to advance well-organized people money for free and pay you to be chosen to do so, partly due to credit scores making this a derisked proposition and partly due to interchange revenue.)

Credit scores decimated the costs of unsecured consumer loans, as is readily observable by seeing what loan availability, pricing, and the "credit box" looks like when they're not available for underwriting. (This is a term of art in consumer credit that I provide for your future Googling pleasure, not having enough time to explain it at the moment.) Compare the cost on a cash advance on any card in your wallet to a payday lender. That delta is substantially (not solely) due to credit scores, both in improved understanding of default risk and in reduced operational cost (of underwriting and servicing, both enabled by the scoring infrastructure).

Credit scores are an important justice-enhancing technology because they make the inputs to an underwriting decision objectively observable and for the first time in history those inputs provably do not include race, religion, etc.

There is an argument which is not immediately dismissible that credit scores are based on borrower behavior which reflects the socioeconomic realities of the United States and therefore somehow effectively encode race, but it is an obvious improvement that banks now mechanically reach the same decision on similarly situated white and black borrowers. Regulation did not make that happen. FICO did.

I think well-off computer programmers should understand that there is a societal tradeoff which buys "middle class black Americans have the same access to credit you do" at the cost of Equifax knowing your credit limits; understand that if you are advocating for rolling back the second you should accept that ceteris paribus we will experience material disimprovement on the first.

(Obligatory disclaimer: personal opinion here.)

Is the World Economic Forum a purveyor of conspiracy theories? Is our reduced purchasing power at the level of food and rent a conspiracy theory?

Edit: My apologies, here's the actual WEF press release https://www.weforum.org/press/2017/05/global-pension-timebom...

Anyway, we’re back to making it the responsibility of the customer with a thousand more important things to think about, rather than of the business that’s dedicated to the stuff.

And if you think it should be that way, great. But it’s obvious to me that it is that way because of the power imbalance, not because it’s right.

The agreements you sign when requesting and getting credit explicitly grant that right.

I kinda think the whole credit system is kinda odd anyways. Someone was starting a business and didn't have any credit to co-sign for the company to get credit to help pay as they needed to scale up. Yet someone who just buys chicken nuggets once a month on their credit card and pay it off in full who makes less money would have a better score than someone who makes millions but is very anti-credit.

I think having credit is good though and it depends on the states but car insurance companies, apartments/real estate and employers factor in your credit score too. If you have low credit and have a job where you deal with cash like say a cashier, someone with low credit is more likely to steal or wreck their car is the assumption. So using to measure how responsible you are.