DELINQUENT

An ambitious insider’s critique of the “debt machine” created by credit card companies and financial culture.

As a former senior business manager at Capital One, Botella is well positioned to explore a landscape of unnecessary, manipulated debt. In addition to her own experience, she weaves in interviews with diverse working Americans about their debt-generating misadventures within this system. “When I started working at Capital One,” she writes, “I was in awe of how smoothly the machine ran, how neatly it seemed to match the lessons in my economics textbooks.” The author clearly shows how the company pursued risk-based pricing, marginal revenue, and other strategies to widen credit availability, reaping huge profits and experimenting to derive new “levers” to manipulate consumers into unwise financial choices. Botella begins with a history lesson, noting how lending practice used to be somewhat straightforward, even at the level of working-class “loan sharks.” Americans now “fall into debt through use of a product that, after decades of scientific experimentation, has been engineered to encourage them to borrow more and pay less.” The author divides her often complex discussion into chapters focused on topics such as the manipulation of interest rates, which ensures that “Americans are charged far too much to borrow money,” and deceptive credit limit policies. “The practice of unsolicited changes to customers’ credit lines,” she writes, “is central to understanding why Americans are so deeply in debt.” The author also explores areas of reform, relating her ideas to those proposed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez: “Americans can afford to, and morally ought to, build a system where no one feels they must turn to high priced credit to survive.” Botella confidently relays her unsettling arguments about how these outwardly populist institutions market indebtedness to consumers, although her detailed discussions of financial tools and levers are sometimes opaque despite her enthusiasm.

Original, passionate fusion of progressive polemic and stark portrait of the labyrinth of contemporary consumer finance.