(CHT François.)
"Austro" as in Rothbard and Wittgenstein, "Athenian" as in Aristotle and smashing-the-plutocracy.
About Roderick T. Long
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
I didn’t really understand the explanation for why she was fired, there was some kind of program the customers could use to get a lower interest rate but they didn’t qualify? Was it related to Tarp? And her boss escorted her out the door with armed goons while telling her she’d give her a good recommendation? Sounds rather strange.
She said the program turned the outstanding balance on the credit card account into a loan, which would be repaid using small installments at a much lower interest rate (not 29.99% in other words) and then closed the credit card account. The purpose of the “irrelevant set of questions” escapes me though.
The purpose of the “irrelevant set of questions” escapes me though.
I gather that, technically, the purpose of the questions was to determine whether the client had a high enough income to be a good risk for the loan. Her objection was that “you can’t afford to repay me at a low interest rate, so you need to keep repaying me at this high interest rate” doesn’t make sense (but of course it makes perfect sense if the goal is to keep them paying dribs and drabs forever).
A result of the banking cartel?
Yup — for one thing, a 30% interest credit card would have a hard time competing in a free market.
So basically the Bank was engaging in a form of extortion only made possible by cartelization of the banks by the state?
Bank of America absorbed Countrywide Home Loans — one of the most reckless lending companies in all this mess. So instead of failure, Countrywide changes its name to BAC Home Loans Servicing. Their services — which are poor — just keep on operating because they can hide behind Bank of America. Same goes for Merrill Lynch.
Roderick, would you agree that these are an even better cases for concurrent currency than mere inflation?
And — theoretically — do you think that concurrent currency could provide a bridge between minarchy and anarchy?
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