Holding up a mirror to the lending industry, with Elena Botella (Delinquent: Inside America's Debt Machine)

<blockquote>"Fairness in pricing often starts with the idea of competition - if there's healthy competition, that will bring the price down. But, in the United States, if you look from the 1990s to the 2020s, credit card profits have steadily risen, and real interest rates have steadily risen and at the same time, default rates have fallen and it's just less expensive, in some ways to run a credit card company than it used to be - so I think that's the first clue that the pricing isn't fair".</blockquote><p><br></p><br><p>In this episode of HTLMTS, I speak to Elena Botella, a fellow CapitalOne alum who, when she realised how incentives in the modern could become misaligned in the modern lending model, decided to do something about it, something rather inspiring to a wandering soul like me - she took herself on a road trip around America to hear the human story of consumer debt.</p><br><p><br></p><blockquote>"In the credit card industry, you see the transaction, you see what some this credit enables, but you don't always see the harm side of it... I heard from consumers who had followed a similar pattern, and came to feel that credit cards had done them more harm than good".</blockquote><p><br></p><br><p><em>Delinquent: Inside the American Debt Machine</em> launched this week (11 October 2022) and is now widely available in all bookstores, but the folks over at <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/delinquent-inside-america-s-debt-machine/9780520380356" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://bookshop.org/books/delinquent-inside-america-s-debt-machine/9780520380356</a> probably appreciate your business more than the bigger names we might gravitate to first (I’m not pointing fingers, I have my own Amazon links down below 😅)</p><p>You can find more of Elena’s writing at <a href="http://elenabotella.com/about" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">http://elenabotella.com/about</a> or<a href="https://twitter.com/elenabotella?s=20&amp;t=9NHDERYyV_TKY2ReQNmVrg" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">&nbsp