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Sports betting is everywhere, especially on credit reports

libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org

21–30 of 54 posts

Re: Sports betting is everywhere, especially on credit reports

#21
post #2

0.5% increase in credit delinquency rates over 3 years feels... underwhelming. I'm not a gambler and I personally find gambling morally questionable and intellectually embarrassing, but golly I'm tired of sports gambling being pointed in a sort of "see, freedom doesn't work!" sort of way. 1% of people will ruin their lives no matter what society does to prevent it. If you have a gambling problem (if it even appeals t…

It was banned most everywhere, then with no public debate on the subject, much less consensus, all of a sudden it was legal and in your face wherever you went. If it's going to be made legal, it needs to be justified, rather than there needing to be justification for making it illegal. I personally think it would have a high bar to overcome.

> If it's going to be made legal, it needs to be justified, rather than there needing to be justification for making it illegal.

Huh, why?

> It was banned most everywhere, then with no public debate on the subject, much less consensus, all of a sudden it was legal and in your face wherever you went.

They didn't change any laws, did they? So it was as legal earlier as it is now, isn't it? It's just that someone found the right loophole that was always there.

Re: Sports betting is everywhere, especially on credit reports

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean…keep reading. For the affected population, it’s around 10 percentage points—or double. So people who sports bet are twice as likely to be delinquent as those who don’t. I’ll give you that the effect is smaller than I expected. Here’s the thing though…it’s not like that trend is slowing down. The finalization of prediction markets and continued normalization of betting as a pro-social behavior is currently head…

Sports betting is regulated, prediction markets aren't though. That's a pretty stark difference

There's plenty of regulation around them. But sure, you can ask for even more, or different regulation.

Re: Sports betting is everywhere, especially on credit reports

#23
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Ban the advertising and promotion of it, like we do for cigarettes, because the industry is really predatory, but leave people the choice.

As Comedy Central put it. “Sports, brought to you by gambling”. I don’t disagree on ad regulation but it’s enmeshed now and will be hard to control. Leagues kept their distance because it looked bad, but now seem to embrace it as it must generate a boat load of ad revenue.

Well, 'sports' itself is predatory and causes lots of young people to trash their health for the amusement of onlookers.

I say 'sports' to mean the stuff people watch on TV and in stadiums. You going for a run or kicking a ball with friends is fine. It's audience-driven sports that are bad.

A bit of betting is small fry by comparison.

Re: Sports betting is everywhere, especially on credit reports

#24

They buried the lede… Participation in sports betting appears to make people about 2x more likely to be delinquent on their loans. Whether you think that’s “bad enough” is another question, but the article doesn’t make it very clear what the effect size is.

I wonder if this is just selection bias People who are bad with money are bad with money

Well, at least you'd want to be careful about correlations vs causation, yes.

Re: Sports betting is everywhere, especially on credit reports

#25

I’m waiting for this to affect more young men from my country of Finland. Decades of a government monopoly on gambling was dismantled, and the market is being opened up for foreign companies buying licenses to operate. It feels like there is a global wave of reintroducing every ”vice” that was somehow curbed with laws and restrictions. Nicotine? Cigarettes were so expensive that young people didn’t even bother, until…

Nicotine is actually good for you (at least no worse than caffeine). It's all the other stuff in tar that's bad for you. And that part of the smoke is bad pretty much whatever you burn.

Vaping avoids most of that.

Re: Sports betting is everywhere, especially on credit reports

#26
post #2

0.5% increase in credit delinquency rates over 3 years feels... underwhelming. I'm not a gambler and I personally find gambling morally questionable and intellectually embarrassing, but golly I'm tired of sports gambling being pointed in a sort of "see, freedom doesn't work!" sort of way. 1% of people will ruin their lives no matter what society does to prevent it. If you have a gambling problem (if it even appeals t…

Percentage increases, and the phrase "X% more likely", are usually quite ambiguous. I wish more people would tell you whether they mean absolute or relative increases. E.g., if (numbers made up for example) 0.5% of the general population are delinquent in credit, but 1% of gamblers are delinquent, then you could report that as either a 0.5% increase (absolute) or a 100% increase (relative). Which one people choose often has a lot to do with the impression they're trying to give: are they trying to panic you, or give you actual facts?

And knowing the baseline of a relative increase can matter a lot. If something goes from a 0.001% to a 0.002% chance of happening, that relative 100% increase means very little. If it goes from a 50% chance of happening to a 100% chance, that same relative 100% increase means a lot: it's gone from a coin-flip to a certainty.

Re: Sports betting is everywhere, especially on credit reports

#27
post #2

0.5% increase in credit delinquency rates over 3 years feels... underwhelming. I'm not a gambler and I personally find gambling morally questionable and intellectually embarrassing, but golly I'm tired of sports gambling being pointed in a sort of "see, freedom doesn't work!" sort of way. 1% of people will ruin their lives no matter what society does to prevent it. If you have a gambling problem (if it even appeals t…

It takes a village. Especially if the problem is systemic and not just the individual. When you count the number of people with some addiction or the other the total represents how many people havent found anything better to do within the system. Thats like finding cells in your brain that are busy looping randomly not fully attached in some useful way to the system. Ofcourse you can zap them and isolate them or remove them but the imaginative solution is reattach them and make them useful to the system in some way. Cause the brains that do will have larger capacities and capabilities than brains that dont.

Re: Sports betting is everywhere, especially on credit reports

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was banned most everywhere, then with no public debate on the subject, much less consensus, all of a sudden it was legal and in your face wherever you went. If it's going to be made legal, it needs to be justified, rather than there needing to be justification for making it illegal. I personally think it would have a high bar to overcome.

Here's the justification; it's my money and I'll spend it how I like

We have many restrictions on what spend our money on. You can't buy illegal drugs, you can't pay someone to kill someone else. You can't buy many different substances without permission of the govt like certain explosives. Some states have limits on buying (or using) lockpicking tools (often called pick lock tools in the law) unless you have certain permissions, like being an active locksmith.

So we have limits on what you buy. Also you can't buy booze if you are underage. You can't buy a gun without a background check.

Re: Sports betting is everywhere, especially on credit reports

#29
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was banned most everywhere, then with no public debate on the subject, much less consensus, all of a sudden it was legal and in your face wherever you went. If it's going to be made legal, it needs to be justified, rather than there needing to be justification for making it illegal. I personally think it would have a high bar to overcome.

> If it's going to be made legal, it needs to be justified, rather than there needing to be justification for making it illegal. Huh, why? > It was banned most everywhere, then with no public debate on the subject, much less consensus, all of a sudden it was legal and in your face wherever you went. They didn't change any laws, did they? So it was as legal earlier as it is now, isn't it? It's just that someone found…

> They didn't change any laws, did they? So it was as legal earlier as it is now, isn't it? It's just that someone found the right loophole that was always there.

In the US, it was banned in most places until 2018. The Supreme Court invalidated the ban that had been in place until then.

Re: Sports betting is everywhere, especially on credit reports

#30
post #2

0.5% increase in credit delinquency rates over 3 years feels... underwhelming. I'm not a gambler and I personally find gambling morally questionable and intellectually embarrassing, but golly I'm tired of sports gambling being pointed in a sort of "see, freedom doesn't work!" sort of way. 1% of people will ruin their lives no matter what society does to prevent it. If you have a gambling problem (if it even appeals t…

That problem 1%* isnt just ruining their own lives, it often spreads to everyone around them. Gambling has a lot of externalities that hit other people. Parents gambling takes away resources from children, gamblers engaging in fraud and and identity theft, workplace theft, embezzelment etc. Also strongly linked to higher rates of domestic violence and violent crime. It dispropotionally affects lower socio-economic groups.

*It may be much higher than 1%

https://www.unsw.edu.au/news/2024/10/new-commission-calls-fo...

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