[HN Gopher] Burrito Now, Pay Later
___________________________________________________________________
Burrito Now, Pay Later
Author : gwintrob
Score : 54 points
Date : 2025-05-11 20:09 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (enterprisevalue.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (enterprisevalue.substack.com)
| coolcase wrote:
| He brushes over ethical concerns of BNPL but draws the line at
| sports betting.
|
| But BNPL by design encourages you to buy things you can't afford
| and complicates your finances with more timed bills to pay. It
| makes it more likely people don't budget well and form buffers.
|
| A PNBL would be better, add 10% tithe to every purchase that goes
| to a checking account. Once that reaches $1k it overflows to an
| index fund.
|
| He says it won't be like 2008 bundling this stuff up and that
| might be right or wrong. To be 2008 you need 2 ingredients:
| combined gambling and banking operations at the banks (a
| legalised FTX of sorts) and some liars in the system
| misrepresenting the risk. Maybe a 3rd ingredient is a
| crazy/frenzy driving up the gambling into the bubbled asset.
| Veedrac wrote:
| I've suggested a different take on PNBL in the context of
| gambling before, to protect people against addiction without
| outright making it illegal as is widely done today. The idea is
| if you want to gamble more than some unprotected quantity, you
| have to first allocate the money and leave it for a month or
| two. People with insufficient impulse control or financial
| security will find that hard, but light recreational users
| shouldn't be inconvenienced too much.
|
| The same ideas can work for other things, though it's easiest
| to apply to predatory behaviour.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| This treatise, from someone obviously in the industry, is merely
| another payday loan shark attempting to justify the existence of
| their clearly predatory products. How many of the consumers of
| this product are even remotely able to comprehend the piece as-is
| described? The article describes a "complete market". Yes, a
| market that is completely able to extract as much money from an
| exploited, uneducated populace as possible. Is that the kind of
| market efficiency we should be advocating for?
|
| The part of the "free market" that these fat cats always gloss
| over is that a cornerstone of a free market is that the consumers
| of the market are able to make educated decisions about the
| products that are available to them. If the populace is incapable
| of doing so in the way the products are presented to them, is
| that really a free market?
| tlonny wrote:
| The product (from the perspective of the consumer) _is_
| relatively straightforward IMO. What isn't straightforward is
| accurately modelling the credit risk of the bonds when this
| class of debt is securitized (the meat of this article). Thus I
| don't think understanding this article is a prerequisite for
| making educated decisions re: BNPL.
| tecleandor wrote:
| It's unhinged.
|
| > Is financing your lunch a sign of societal decay? Maybe,
| maybe not.
|
| Financing your lunch means you can't pay for your lunch. And
| then somebody comes to search profit in that. Yep, it's
| societal decay.
|
| Ah, but he draws the line at sports bets, he doesn't like that.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > > Is financing your lunch a sign of societal decay? Maybe,
| maybe not.
|
| > Financing your lunch means you can't pay for your lunch.
| And then somebody comes to search profit in that. Yep, it's
| societal decay.
|
| Counterargument: almost always when I buy something, lunch or
| otherwise, I put it on a credit card, which I pay off always
| before the due date but essentially never on the same day I
| had the lunch. Viewed through the lens of a society that only
| paid up front in cash, what I do would be viewed as risky and
| irresponsible; but it is not.
|
| BNPL as it currently exists, in the form described in this
| article, is exploitative. But the American credit card
| system, which is the same sort of thing mildly rearranged, is
| far less exploitative.
| scubbo wrote:
| Amen. It's been my experience that, for any innovation in
| financial technology, if you keep asking "and why is that
| beneficial?" for long enough, you will finally arrive (via
| tangents into "liquidity" and suchlike) at "it allows those
| with money to extract more money from those with less money".
| r053bud wrote:
| Yes. That's literally the economic system we have agreed upon
| in the United States States and continue to vote for.
| blagie wrote:
| I don't know that's quite true.
|
| I've seen cases where it allows those with money to extract
| money from those with a lot of money too.
|
| Take this situation:
|
| Business A and business B are both doing well and competing
| with each other in a duopoly.
|
| a) No credit: Each business needs to be in the black, and
| competition is sustainable.
|
| b) Credit: Whichever business borrows more money to spend on
| buying customers is more competitive in the short term (which
| can lead to monopoly long-term). Both businesses run in the
| red are and brittle. In any downturn, tightening of credit,
| etc. both are liable to go under.
|
| This competition to raise increasing amount of money to be
| competitive (to increasing devaluation and/or debt makes for
| a pretty broken economy), and makes traditional businesses
| (which invest in R&D from profits) increasingly
| unsustainable.
|
| This even goes to government level. Historically, if e.g. two
| European powers were in a war, whomever could borrow more to
| buy weapons / hire mercenaries would have an advantage.
| Access to credit made for more costly, more deadly wars, and
| broken national economies. If neither side had access to
| credit, both sides would be strictly better off.
| smallpipe wrote:
| An industry of parasites, extracting money from people already
| down on their luck. Rats.
| darkwater wrote:
| > Picture Alice, who forgets a $25 installment on her $100
| DoorDash transaction. She's hit with a $7 late fee, tacked onto
| her next payment. Annoying, but it probably won't push her down a
| debt spiral.
|
| This is so disconnected from reality that it's not just worrisome
| but despicable. Why did Alice missed a 25$? Maybe, just maybe,
| because she struggles to make ends meet, so if she had problems
| paying 25$, now she will have MORE problem paying 32$. Yes, she
| could have not chosen to use Klarna and she could have not chosen
| to buy something at all, but hey, who is gonna pay that IPO now?
| immibis wrote:
| Alice missed the $25 payment because her balance was zero,
| triggering a $7 late payment fee, $30 failed payment fee and
| $30 overdraft protection fee. Alice used the service more than
| once, so she missed not just this payment, but 20 simultaneous
| payments, having $1340 taken from her in total, eating her
| whole next two paychecks. During the time of those next two
| paychecks, it will be time to pay the next two instalments,
| triggering the same fees each time.
| zug_zug wrote:
| Is this really how this works? Do you have a source?
|
| Also... in this situation does klarna get any of that 1340 or
| does Alice just delete the app?
| alright2565 wrote:
| It is exaggerated, particularly the 2 $30 fees: a $30
| "failed payment" fee sounds like a bounced check, and
| doesn't really apply here, and there's been a general
| crackdown on overdraft protection fees.
|
| But it doesn't need exaggeration! A missed payment
| accelerating the loan to 46% APY effective is already usury
| and bad enough!
| dmayle wrote:
| This is a bit of an exaggeration, but otherwise correct...
|
| Alice has $100 in burrito debt at 0%, but misses one
| payment, which automatically reverts to a 30% interest
| rate, back-tracked to the start of the "loan".
|
| She also receives a $7 late payment fee, which is
| equivalent to about 90% interest for the time covered.
|
| Her bank will often re-order operations on a given day in
| order to maximize the fees charge (yes, this happens, yes,
| this is legal), so even if she had her paycheck arriving on
| the same, the operations will often be sequenced with
| largest debits first, followed by credits, so that the
| overdraft hits as early as possible, and the most possible
| number of failed payment fees can be extracted, followed by
| the credit, which is now greatly reduced
|
| (I actually had this happen to me as a student once, five
| late payment fees because of re-ordering, which caused me
| to both never let this happen again, and change banks
| immediately for one which wasn't as predatory).
|
| Burrito loans are like payday loans, but even more
| predatory... They are neither ethical, nor moral (usury is
| even covered in the old testament, for christian folk).
| mattnewton wrote:
| > If you think the price of oil will be $120 after a year, you
| can use futures or options on futures to make this bet. If you
| think the S&P 500 will be over 6,500 within 2 years and the yield
| on 10Y Treasury bonds will be 4.25%, investment bankers will help
| you express this view for a fee.
|
| I'm sorry but I think the either the author or I have entirely
| lost the plot. Finance is a game we play to make humans better
| off, not to "express their views" - if you think that being able
| to bet on everything makes society better off, that's an argument
| you can make, but it is not self evidently good to me and it is
| not an argument the article seems to make.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| The author is writing creatively. s/express this view/bet on
| this
| andy99 wrote:
| Trading one thing for another is expressing your view that the
| latter is more valuable than the former.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| A well-written, if cringey and uncritical article. Obviously a
| "complete market" assumes that risk can be fully accounted for,
| and that our world is not full of inherent contingencies and
| things which escape our immediate perception.
| pxndx wrote:
| Absolutely unhinged content from someone who needs to touch
| grass. Payday loans are scams that prey on the poorest, most
| uneducated people. This industry is actively harmful to society.
| But hey, I'm sure writing this helps you sleep at night.
| howard941 wrote:
| The payday loan people are _very_ nice and friendly. Seriously.
| Maybe the only friendly finance people those struggling talk
| to. Even so yes they are actively harmful.
| proof_by_vibes wrote:
| Speak for yourself. I've got $10mil riding on put options for
| Jane Doe's pizza that she bought for her child's birthday party
| last week. People like you spreading FUD is threatening my
| portfolio.
| karamanolev wrote:
| I really wish I could downvote it, but then I again I would
| prefer people see it, get appalled and decide that BNPL is even
| worse than they previously thought. Is there a "begrudgingly
| upvote" option?
| ghuroo1 wrote:
| same here, it's one of the few times I wish I could downvote an
| "article" on HN
| zug_zug wrote:
| I think this would be more informative if it dropped all moral
| pretense and just talked about the economics objectively. If
| we're gonna call a spade a spade, bnpl is one of a dozen services
| that extracts money from those whose judgment we doubt (like
| gambling, lottery, junk food?, drugs, overpriced status-symbol
| vehicles, or even "digital goods").
| narrator wrote:
| Pffft... loans to buy burritos? Wake me up when I can make a
| burrito and take out a burrito equity loan using it as
| collateral. I will gladly start making burritos.
| an0malous wrote:
| > Is financing your lunch a sign of societal decay? Maybe, maybe
| not. But it's definitely an evolution in Market Completion. As a
| financial engineering and market completion enjoyer, I think this
| is great. A Complete Market is one where every risk can be
| priced, traded, or hedged. i.e. every risk has a price, every
| future has a counterparty.
|
| This is a great example of how sociopathy is useful for building
| businesses. The tech version of this is:
|
| "Will it destroy society and the job market? Maybe, maybe not.
| But it's definitely going to get us AGI."
|
| People just openly admit that their business will hurt a lot of
| people but that it's great for some abstract goal that has vague-
| at-best upside.
| ary wrote:
| > Despite skepticism from Volcker and Buffet, financial
| innovation has been and will continue to be a massive net
| positive for humanity.
|
| Juxtaposing yourself with Warren Buffet and then hand-waving away
| his wisdom is probably the reddest of flags when discussing
| finance (not that Buffet is always right). "Innovation" in payday
| loans is akin to inventing new ways to feed living, breathing
| things into a meat grinder. In this case it's the poorest among
| us. The author goes on to say:
|
| > Is financing your lunch a sign of societal decay? Maybe, maybe
| not. But it's definitely an evolution in Market Completion.
|
| This is undiagnosed sociopathy.
|
| There is a point when making a thing that you _must_ ask "what
| affect will this have on the world?" or you risk destroying far
| more than you create. Finance types have learned absolutely
| nothing since Buffet laid down his "newspaper test":
|
| "I want them to not only do what's legal obviously, but I want
| them to judge every action by how it would appear on the front
| page of their local paper written by a smart but semi-unfriendly
| reporter who really understood it to be read by their family,
| their neighbors, their friends."
| xg15 wrote:
| This. Also, I like the term "net positive" in articles like
| this. If you lose everything, but I win even more, it's
| technically still a "net positive". Even if only one person
| would be happy about it.
| neilv wrote:
| I'm happy someone else also had the same thoughts, and put it
| better than I could.
|
| Incidentally, regarding Buffet's sensibilities, I once felt it
| worthwhile to write to Berkshire Hathaway's little office,
| about a new shady thing one of their holdings was rumored to be
| doing towards employees, and whether that fit BRK's standard of
| good management. My note almost certainly got tossed into the
| crazy-people round-file, but it'd be nice if Warren Buffet
| called up a CEO or Chair, and said, "Hi, Bob. This is Warren.
| What kind of shop are you running over there?"
| cyrnel wrote:
| BNPL is only "good" if your definition of "good" is about GDP,
| market flexibility, high-performance index funds, and other
| things that have nothing to do with human happiness.
|
| I'll believe that BNPL is good when all the companies become non-
| profits that use excess funds to cancel debts rather than lining
| the pockets of rich investors.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I have a background in options trading and fixed income markets,
| basically the kind of professional education one gets while
| participating in the "financialization of everything".
|
| I'm not sure it's great.
|
| It's definitely useful for people to be able to unbundle risks.
| Or rather, it's useful to someone who knows what they are doing.
| Something like what's described in the article, for instance,
| where there's a mutual benefit to executing the financial
| transaction.
|
| But what I really worry about is that where there's a game to be
| played, there are chips to be lost. Financializing everything
| creates a million little games, and the games favor people who
| know the rules.
|
| If you're living in the old world, and someone offers you a
| university place, you just take it if you can afford it. What
| happens? Kids who can afford it will take it. If they do well,
| they make the surplus. If they can't afford it, that's tough, but
| they also aren't out of pocket. If you take a degree and things
| don't go as planned, you lost the capital, but you aren't in
| massive debt as well.
|
| In the new world, what happens? Well, you can now take a loan.
| That's you taking a bet on your future income being sufficient to
| pay off the interest on your loan, and hopefully also the
| principal. You are basically mortgaging your education. More
| people can go in this model, but the extra people are also more
| likely to be the marginal people. They get a roll of the dice
| that they didn't have, but even though as a group they are going
| to roughly break even, some will end up in trouble that they
| could not ever have ended in without the loans. People who win in
| this game are still paying out part of their winnings: you're a
| doctor, but you still gotta pay your loans. People who lose are
| in deep trouble.
|
| Both the winner and the loser are paying the financial market.
|
| Now throw in a non-bankruptcy law for these loans and watch the
| whole market eat itself as lenders figure out that they can
| really be quite casual about who to lend the money to.
|
| The same thing happens with actual mortgages. If you lived in a
| world where nobody lent money for a house, a house would cost a
| lot less. Instead, you get to compete with other borrowers to bid
| up prices. You're taking a bigger risk for the same house that
| someone a hundred years ago might have considered to be for the
| poorer people in the city. (Look at restrictions on building for
| an underlying reason why the market flies.)
|
| The same happens with cars. The same is happening with BNPL.
|
| Who wins with these games? Financial intermediaries. The vast
| economy of marketing the loans, turning them into derivatives,
| trading those derivatives, administrating them, all sorts of
| ancillary functions.
|
| Also, deeper pockets. Much like insurance, if you can bag
| together a bunch of risks, some of them will offset each other.
| The individual who is taking a degree cannot normally derisk it
| by some portfolio effect, and he certainly can't just offload it
| with a phone call.
|
| It's like everybody has to ante up to sit at the poker table of
| life. You can't just let the button come to you, you have to play
| all the time. You can't just be a doctor or a lawyer, everyone
| needs to be a trader.
| jerf wrote:
| I have an _extremely_ difficult time imagining that these BNPL
| loans are being shoved into bonds and offloaded on to the
| market in a way that even _resembles_ a result in which the
| buyers of those bonds are fully educated about the risks and
| making optimal choices. It sure looks to me like the BNPL
| companies have every motivation to shove off their liabilities
| into these bonds in a way that gets them artificially rated far
| higher than they should be, and turn other people not into
| refined, educated consumers selecting their financial
| investments through enlightened wisdom, but into bagholders for
| debt that they were basically lied to about.
|
| The numbers coming out of these companies are simply
| implausible, especially their claimed delinquincy rates;
| unsecured debt agains subprime borrowers that up until recently
| wasn't reported to any credit agency, basically a perfect storm
| of debt that won't be paid off, but it was doing far, far
| better delinquincy numbers than credit card debt? Implausible.
| But the market, in its current mood, believes it enough for
| them to get away with it.
| pkul wrote:
| While I agree with your sentiment of the "old world", I'm not
| sure that I can entirely agree with your views here.
|
| What I do notice and do agree on is the fact that our society
| has become too financialized, there are too many people working
| in the financial sector that spend their days studying and
| trading financial products that oftentimes stem from debt.
|
| But I also can't imagine our society without debt, how will we
| give the chance for people to attempt to create enterprises and
| businesses without it? Where would you draw the middle ground
| here?
| edmundsauto wrote:
| If houses sold for a lot less, there would probably be fewer
| built, which would drive up the housing prices due to
| increasing scarcity. But now people can't take on debt to buy
| them, so everything just sort of... stagnates.
| brudgers wrote:
| <I am not an economist>
|
| The arguments sound like the rationals commonly ascribed to
| subprime mortgage burritos twenty years ago. So if the ultimate
| results for wealth and the unwealthy wind up being similar, I
| won't be terribly surprised.
|
| </I am not an economist>
| programjames wrote:
| Why do finance bros like to call allocating all the resources to
| the maximal-dollar extracting process "efficient". It's not. All
| they're doing is turning the economy's entropy into dollar bills
| now, which stunts future growth.
| jerf wrote:
| In economics, "efficient" doesn't mean "produces maximal
| dollars". It means something much more like "an efficient
| economy has no arbitrage opportunities", because they've
| already been squeezed out. An efficient economy is one in which
| all the prices are correct, not one in which wealth-creation is
| maximized. Correct prices may help wealth-creation, but that
| would be a downstream effect.
| janosch_123 wrote:
| I didn't understand this section, why would they pay $73 for $75
| and where do the $25 come from?
|
| "Investor Economics: Assume a $100 BNPL loan. $25 is paid upfront
| by the Consumer, so an Investor pays $73 for a $75 loan,
| discounted for risk, fees, and return expectations. The Investor
| receives $75 from customer repayments over 6 weeks minus
| servicing fees of $0.25. A $1.75 profit on $73 investment over 6
| weeks is a 2.4% return, or 22.8% annualized (52 weeks/6 weeks =
| 8.67 periods each year; annualized return = (1+0.024)8.67 - 1)."
| dustincoates wrote:
| For why the investor pays $73, it's right there in your quote:
|
| > an Investor pays $73 for a $75 loan, discounted for risk,
| fees, and return expectations
|
| The investor doesn't expect to get 100% of that $75 back on
| average.
|
| The $25 is the first payment, which is made immediately.
| cousin_it wrote:
| I'm beginning to think that consumer debt simply shouldn't exist.
| If you don't have money to buy something, don't buy it. If you
| don't have money for necessities (food/housing/healthcare),
| putting you into debt isn't the right answer anyway. A safety net
| is the right answer.
| msm_ wrote:
| I agree, with exception of housing. Most people can't buy home
| with cash, and for many this is a necessity. But homes are an
| appreciating asset, which cannot be said about cars or food -
| this is an investment, actually. But for everything else -
| cars, phones, electronics, food, subscriptions, jewelry - I
| 100% agree. Consider two people:
|
| * One person has $10k saved, invested into something safe and
| liquid. Then buys something for $10k, earns and invests that
| $10k back, and because of investing is a bit up (let's say now
| they own $10.3k)
|
| * The other person borrows $10k, and repays $11k over time.
|
| This buy-and-earn cycle will repeat, and each time the person
| that fronted $10k is $1.3k up (and due to interest, this is
| only growing with time). The difference quickly becomes
| staggering. Tragic, and a classic rich-get-richer situation.
| And the only difference is the starting $10k and some
| discipline.
| api wrote:
| Housing being an appreciating asset is a social ill. It means
| that housing can never be affordable, and that as it
| appreciates it locks out progressively more people.
|
| This is true unless wages are also always going up, which is
| not the case unless it's all just inflation in which case
| nothing is really appreciating.
| cousin_it wrote:
| I think without mortgages most people would rent or rent-to-
| own, rents wouldn't be dragged up by housing appreciation,
| and affordable/social housing would be cheaper to provide
| because of lower opportunity cost.
| blagie wrote:
| Personally, I think we should have all rent-extracting
| industries nationalized.
|
| Land, like in China, should be available only under a 99-year
| lease (perhaps with a modest homestead exemption). The
| government should own radio airwaves, natural resources, and
| banking. This doesn't mean that it couldn't hire private
| contractors to do the work (e.g. bidding on oil extraction),
| but Chevron and Exxon shouldn't own the oil field.
|
| And I think the government should provide very basic,
| minimal, Soviet-grade housing free to everyone.
|
| If you'd like your kids to have their own bedrooms, you pay.
| If you're happy with a 2-bedroom for a family of four (kids
| room, adults room), or dorm-style housing for adults, you can
| live there for free.
|
| Having a free option would, in fact, drive costs down for
| everyone.
|
| More broadly, we should rationalize what's nationalized. For
| example, a lot of parts of education make sense with a lot
| more open competition.
| nighthawk454 wrote:
| This is blatantly just increasing debt load. What does a business
| do if they need forever growth, but can't increase their prices
| further without losing net revenue? Raise prices anyway and push
| people to finance it.
|
| This is broadly not good for people. Financing things like your
| food or your rent (seriously - that's a thing here) doesn't help
| if they're recurring. It's not like people are gonna need to just
| finance one month's rent payment and then they're solvent and
| paying off the next 4 months normally plus installments. Really,
| what could structurally change in someone's personal finances
| over a 6-8 week term? If you couldn't afford a burrito or rent
| this week, what possible belief is there that next month you can
| afford that plus debt service.
|
| The loans are just gonna stack and stack. Which will drive people
| into more debt, and more need for continued financing. This isn't
| a multi billion dollar business because people just need a
| temporary boost once every year or two because their paycheck
| timing is off. It's a flywheel money extraction machine.
|
| Securitizing these debts doesn't make them a good idea for the
| consumers. It makes it good for the industry so it can scale it
| up larger. Which means more people in more debt more of the time
| with "investors" extracting wealth from it.
|
| Plus then there's the whole systemic risk of people not paying
| back. They bake into the rates some percentage of defaults, and
| the larger the pool size the safer that gets. This systemically
| is a bet that no more than X% of loans will default at once.
| Basically shorting loan defaults.
|
| Which is cute and all until any economic situation hits where a
| bunch more people suddenly can't pay at the same time. In which
| case the whole thing unwinds brutally. And given that the play is
| to literally sell financial products that increase pressure on
| people's ability to pay... this is probably super unwise. Combine
| that with any of the major structural economic issues we have
| ongoing and you're poking a sleeping pressure cooker.
|
| The only real questions are how much can be extracted before it
| explodes, and who is the ultimate bag holder at the end?
|
| "If you thought 2008 was fun, well hold my beer..." - finance,
| probably
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| The article says "one" reason of why credit exists is to bridge
| the timing of money. But assumes fully later that that's the only
| reason, with no regards to how extractive credit can become,
| fueling bad habit. You can of course blame the individual for
| this, but ultimately it becomes societal.
| _QrE wrote:
| > "Despite skepticism from Volcker and Buffet, financial
| innovation has been and will continue to be a massive net
| positive for humanity."
|
| I'm not an economist by any means, but most 'financial
| innovation' I've seen has resulted in new regulations to rein it
| in and/or block it, which is not a good look for the entire
| sector. Strong start.
|
| > "To free up capital, the provider bundles many $100 loans and
| sells them to investors for 95 cents on the dollar through
| securitization. This allows the provider to recycle funds into
| new loans, continuing to earn fees."
|
| > "In exchange for fees, banks structure these loans and quickly
| move them off their balance sheets and to investors."
|
| Even if we ignore the morality of providing predatory loans to
| people who can't afford to pay for groceries up front, you would
| think that someone making a good-faith argument would realize,
| upon writing stuff like the above, that no, this is not a good
| financial product actually.
|
| If the author actually read some of the stuff they've linked,
| they'd come across stuff like this:
|
| > "A larger proportion of interest-bearing loans will put the
| BNPL platforms under tighter regulatory scrutiny, since there are
| rules and regulations to cap interest rates and to ensure
| sufficient disclosures to consumers, said Stephen Biggar,
| director of financial services research at Argus Research."
|
| > "Warehouse facilities tend to have the highest cost compared to
| other funding sources, while selling the receivables as asset-
| backed securities is generally cheaper but more volatile and
| risky, depending on investors' sentiment, Lucas said."
|
| I'm sure the author would say that the fact that there's an
| appetite for this justifies the offering existing, and I'm
| looking forward to their next article about all the positive
| value that loan sharks provide, or why all the failures derived
| from high-risk assets falling through are perfectly fine.
|
| > "Non-Systemic Risk (possibly famous last words but we'll see)"
|
| > "Do I want to see a Sports Betting BBS Index? No. Will it
| happen? Definitely. Sports betting does a lot of damage to the
| finances of American households but when the loans backing them
| are securitized, they will make for a great fixed income product
| because because gambling is a somewhat recession-resilient
| industry, much like other 'sin sectors' like alcohol and tobacco
| (BBS indexes for alcohol and tobacco will also happen, and around
| here is where I may get tired of winning)."
|
| I hope that this entire article is a joke that flew over my head.
|
| > "Late Fees: Miss a payment, and you'll likely face a modest
| fee, often capped to keep things reasonable. Picture Alice, who
| forgets a $25 installment on her $100 DoorDash transaction. She's
| hit with a $7 late fee, tacked onto her next payment. Annoying,
| but it probably won't push her down a debt spiral."
|
| Yes, I'm sure that tacking on a 30% late fee to a person who
| can't pay $25 is reasonable.
|
| > "In Design, the principle of Universal Design focuses on
| creating inclusive systems and tools that improve usability for
| all. Autocorrect, text-to-speech readers, dark mode, and
| subtitles all came from Universal Design. Similarly, lending that
| makes credit more affordable and accessible for lower-income
| individuals will reduce credit costs for all borrowers."
|
| This is such a bad-faith argument, I'm frankly surprised to see
| it written.
|
| The _least_ I can say about the article is that I am unconvinced,
| and that I'd be happy if I never got the chance to meet the
| author.
| Igrom wrote:
| How is everyone so sure this is not satire? Consider the
| subscription prompt:
|
| >To receive new posts and support my grift, please become a
| subscriber.
| _QrE wrote:
| Props to the author if it is. I'd have a link to donate to a
| food bank after the article so that people can do something
| more productive than write angry comments.
| kweingar wrote:
| I keep hearing people express dismay that people are financing
| their lunch, sneakers, or concert tickets.
|
| But this has been the norm for a while, no? I can't remember the
| last time I _didn 't_ utilize credit at a restaurant or retail
| store. If you use credit cards, it doesn't make sense to
| reflexively admonish people for using BNPL for everyday
| purchases.
|
| To be sure, BNPL is in many ways a predatory innovation. But it
| isn't totally novel. It seems like a natural consequence of what
| came before.
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