Charging Ahead
What Is the Problem?
Lucid and succinct, the book directly confronts the hard questions about credit cards. Chock full of data, blended with fascinating anecdotes, with an appendix illustrating patterns in card use around the world, the book provides an unparalleled resource for understanding exactly how we have gotten to where we are.
The important role credit cards play in weaning our economy from its expensive reliance on paper-based checks.
- The psychology of payments, in which the card-carrying consumer is more likely to spend than the consumer that pays with cash or checks
- A detailed analysis of credit card borrowing and consumer bankruptcy filings around the world, with the first empirical demonstration of the causal link between card use and bankruptcy
- The largely untold story of how accidental features of our history (like the fragmentation of our banking system, the interstate highway system, and poor accounting systems at some of our largest banks) combined to make the United States uniquely suited to the credit card as we now know it
- A comparative historical survey illustrating how the credit card has spread around the world, and why it is used so differently in other countries: A Big Mac tastes pretty much the same thing in Chicago , London , or Tokyo , but the credit card used in those three cities is a very different thing.
Working from that empirical, historical, and analytical foundation, Charging Ahead sets out a clear and simple case for regulation of payment cards:
- Financial distress imposes costs on society as a whole
- Credit card use leads to financial distress
- Regulation advances social welfare if it limits the costs of financial distress or shifts those costs to the lenders whose activity leads to them.
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