In Maxed Out, James D Scurlock shows us the dark underbelly of the financial services industry—and the view isn't pretty.
Maxed Out is billed as "the book the credit industry doesn't want you to read", and it is easy to see why. The book paints a rather frightening picture of the shenanigans of the financial industry in the US and the UK and the extent and consequences of consumer indebtedness in these countries. Many people in these countries are heavily in debt, and the credit card is the industry's preferred instrument of enslavement.
James D Scurlock, the author of the book, came across the stories in the book—most of them tragic—during the course of his attempts to make a documentary film on the subject. The book derives much of its impact from these stories of people—many of them poor, some of them ill-educated—who have become entrapped in a vicious cycle of indebtedness. Along the way, we also learn of the dubious practices adopted by credit card companies to sell yet more debt, to those already neck-deep in the stuff.
In the aftermath of the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, the financial services industry in the US came to be tightly regulated. Scurlock credits (if that is the right word) Walter Wriston, who retired as the Chairman of Citicorp in 1984, as being a key figure in the unraveling of the web of regulations that limited the things that banks and financial services firms could and could not do. As the regulatory constraints vanished, so did much of the prudence in lending that characterized old-style banking. Bankers had always known that their profits came from debt, but were prevented from hard-selling the products that brought them the most profits; now, they became free to sell more and more debt, using almost any means possible, and thus increase their profits. |
