Episode Transcript
Downside Up
DEC 5, 2022
What if we lived in a world without credit?
Speakers
Chris Cillizza
Clip from MasterCard
Commerical
Chris Cillizza, Clip from MasterCard Commerical, Sarah Quinn, Clip from The Godfather, Monica
Prasad, Emily Flitter, Clip from Home Alone 2,
00:00:03
When was the last time you paid for something in cash? I've carried around credit cards for most
of my adult life. It's second nature to just swipe or tap my card and move about my day. And
Americans use credit for everything these days. Remember that old MasterCard commercial?
00:00:22
There are some things money can't buy. For everything else there's MasterCard.
00:00:27
Chris Cillizza
We buy all kinds of things like groceries or gas or movie tickets on credit. But then we also take
out loans for big life changing purchases, like a college education or a home mortgage. Good
credit scores are a crucial part of the American dream. But what if we couldn't take out loans?
What if we couldn't buy anything on credit? How would that reshape our lives? I'm Chris Cillizza
and you're listening to the last episode of this season of Downside Up. Thanks so much for
listening. Today, we're examining what our world might look like if we couldn't buy things on
credit. So join me as we turn our financial systems downside up.
00:01:13
Chris Cillizza
Before we imagine a world without credit, let's get on the same page about what credit actually
is. I understand the basics of how a credit card works. I go to a store. I swipe a piece of plastic. A
bank pays the store and later I pay back the bank. But credit in general is a little more
complicated than that. Sarah Quinn is the author of "American Bonds: How Credit Markets
Shaped a Nation" and a sociology professor at the University of Washington. She says, amazingly,
the idea of credit actually predates money.
00:01:45
Most people think that credit comes from money. So first we have money, and then if you don't
have access to money, you can use credit to borrow. Historically, that's not the way it works. Most
of the time, people have always lent each other things, and money is one of the things we lend
each other. But people have all sorts of obligations, and credit is an old, old practice.
00:02:13
Credit is basically an IOU. Maybe you owe your buddy some pizza and a case of beer because he
helped you unload a moving truck earlier this month. Or you owe the bank a couple hundred
grand for the mortgage on your house. Credit and debt are the way that we track what we owe to
each other, and it's something humans have done for a long, long time. The Sumerians tracked
debt and credit at least 3500 years ago. You see references to debt and credit in the Bible, the
Torah and the Quran.
00:02:42
In the "Genealogy of Morals" Nietzche points to the code of the Hammurabi's extensive lending
rules to kind of say that credit relations are ancient social bonds. They're kind of the core of what
it means to be a person.
Sarah Quinn
Chris Cillizza
Sarah Quinn
Chris Cillizza
Sarah Quinn
Chris Cillizza
00:02:54
It's a little bit hard to wrap our minds around the core of what it means to be a person but here's
how Sarah breaks it down.
00:03:01
The way I think about credit is credit's one form that human obligations and human promises
take. There are set of promises or obligations that involve our material life. And money is one way
that we have of keeping track of those obligations. And if you ask an economist the likely answer,
you'll get to the question of what is credit, is that it's about bringing value from the future to today.
You don't have access to money today, but if you can convince somebody that you're going to
make an investment or build a business that will be profitable, they'll give you access to those
funds today so you can build the thing and access the future value now.
00:03:43
In other words, credit offers a bridge to the future. You borrow money now, and if you use it wisely,
you're able to generate enough money to pay it back at a later date. But Sarah thinks that credit
is also a bridge to the past.
00:03:56
Sarah Quinn
If you talk to sociologists and anthropologists, and I'm a sociologist, you'll also be reminded that
not only does credit bring potentially value from the future to today, it also brings inequalities and
double standards and racism from the past into the current moment and from the current
moment into the future.
00:04:16
Chris Cillizza
Explain that a little bit more.
00:04:18
Sarah Quinn
So one of the ways you could think about getting access to credit is that you're taking all of your
social resources, your job, your access to money, your access to other wealthy people who might
be able to cosign or guarantee you or bail you out, the social opportunities available for you, the
ideas you have about where and how to make money, you're cashing all of those in for a loan for
money at a certain rate. And all of those things are related to social inequality. So we have tons
and tons of data that actually there's a ton of inequality in who gets what kinds of job. The history
of credit is really a massive story about government involvement of racial inequality and access
to mortgages and the ability to build wealth.
00:05:08
To understand how credit can be both a bridge to the future and to the past, let's look at the ways
that credit has shaped American history. Let's go all the way back to the European colonization of
America.
00:05:20
Chris Cillizza
Sarah Quinn
Chris Cillizza
Sarah Quinn
There are many times in places where credit is used much more expansively earlier in U.S. history
than people think. So if you look at the development of capitalism in 16th century England, most
transactions were based on credit and trust. Money was only used in a small portion of those
exchanges. Settler and frontier economies almost always tend to run on credit because they're
sending their currency abroad and they have to borrow and lend in order to have exchange
locally.
00:05:50
These days, we can transfer money in the blink of an eye using the Internet. But in the 16th and
17th centuries, money had to cross oceans and continents to get from one party to the other. So a
lot of local economies relied on credit and trust that would also carry through after the American
Revolution, as Americans spread further and further west across the continent. And the revolution
itself relied on colonists borrowing money from the Dutch in order to fight the British.
00:06:16
So credit has always been part of the American story. We don't have the Revolutionary War
without borrowing money and the decision to sell off government land as opposed to give it away
right after the revolution was the decision to try to raise money through land sales to repay that
debt rather than have people pay taxes and this famously tax averse young nation.
00:06:47
Chris Cillizza
So the American Revolution relied on the colonial government borrowing money from the Dutch,
and then they tried to recoup that money by taking native land and selling it to settlers on credit.
So credit and debt have long been baked into American history. And as it turns out, so was
American debt forgiveness, because most settlers were never able to pay the U.S. colonial
government back for that land.
00:07:10
Sarah Quinn
That never worked well. They never made the money they thought. And people ended up owing
massive amounts of money to the U.S. government. And the government passed something like
24 different relief acts about 20 years later to help bail out settlers who had run into financial
trouble with that.
00:07:28
Chris Cillizza
The American economy, particularly farming, was very unpredictable from year to year. And so
the American credit markets were shaped in part by American farmers.
00:07:38
Credit has always been a part of stories of farmers everywhere. Farmers absolutely need credit
because they need to make all these investments in their land, the need to be able to keep
themselves the lives and their family lives and improve the land, plant and survive until they have
a harvest to sell. So that means farmers need credit. American farmers desire for stable forms of
credit becomes a really important force in the late 19th and early 20th century and calling the
modern central, large federal government into existence. One of the first things that happens with
a stronger central national government is the Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916, which redesigns
U.S. farm credit from the ground up.
00:08:27
Sarah Quinn
Chris Cillizza
The Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916 was a pivotal American policy that you probably didn't learn
much about in school. In a nutshell, it massively expanded access to credit to farmers, allowing
them to cultivate their land, grow their herds of animals and pay off their loans. Over time, that
access to credit has provided farm families a path to financial security.
00:08:48
Sarah Quinn
We can kind of zone in and out of different places of U.S. history in different times of U.S. history,
and we'll always find credit playing a role. It's hugely important for the development of
infrastructure. So one way to think about this is the development of the Transcontinental
Railroads. People know that the government was giving away tracts of land, and they sometimes
might think that the race between railroad companies was just to occupy that land. But actually,
what railroad companies wanted was to be able to claim land because they were issuing debt
that the government helped guarantee, backed by that, to raise money to develop the railroads.
00:09:30
Chris Cillizza
We often hear stories about self-made millionaire railroad tycoons, but American infrastructure
was built on credit, often backed by the government without systems of credit. America, as we
know it today, might not exist.
00:09:42
And then the credits are part of the best parts of U.S. history and the worst. So the history of
slavery is also a history of investments being made, coming through Europe, coming through New
York, and being funneled into the South to pay for enslavement. And that's a part of American
credit history, too. And what we can see there is, you know, as the nation developed, it was the
states that often acted as local development banks, and if that state was Mississippi, that what it
was developing was a slavery based cotton trade.
00:10:21
Sarah Quinn
Chris Cillizza
I just want to pause for a minute here to acknowledge that this is a very dark side of our history.
The U.S. government was giving away land it had taken from Native Americans. And then when
Americans were trying to borrow more money from the government, they would often list
enslaved people as part of their property. These slaves became collateral, often used to secure
mortgages. The landowners would then use the forced labor of slaves to pay off that debt or to
purchase even more slaves. And even after the Civil War, options for free black men and women
weren't much better. Sharecroppers, many of them black, were often trapped in debtor
relationships with landowners.
00:10:58
Sarah Quinn
So sharecroppers had access to credit. They were forced to use credit to pay for food and good
and grains and then trapped into basically debt peonage after the Civil War. Right. This is the story
of how black labor was captured at Civil War. So when we're talking about who has access to
credit historically, I think the important thing to keep in mind is that we're talking about these
informal credit markets. There's always been the neighbor you borrow from or pawnshops or the
loan shark. I mean, these things have always existed.
00:11:37
Chris Cillizza
This is a pretty important point. A lot of the credit success stories we discussed earlier involve the
backing of the US government, which offered a level of security that informal systems of credit
did not. Sharecroppers, on the other hand, could fall into debt quickly thanks to unreasonable and
unregulated repayment terms. Think of loan sharks or mob bosses. They offer loans to people
who might have been shut out of more legitimate credit systems, and these arrangements rarely
have a happy ending.
00:12:04
Clip from The Godfather
I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse.
00:12:07
Sarah Quinn
So people often had access to credit in history, that access to credit wasn't always on great
terms or particularly fair. And the question of who has access to fair credit? Who has access to
credit that's not extractive or exploitative, that doesn't trap them in poverty, but that allows them
to gain wealth or improve their world, that's often the real question.
00:12:34
Chris Cillizza
One of the big stories of America in the 20th century is the ongoing push for better and fairer
access to legitimate forms of credit. But that also means that the government itself gets more
and more involved in financial deals like mortgages, and a big part of that story involves the Great
Depression and the New Deal.
00:12:52
So what happens with the New Deal? You know, we're dealing with the Great Depression and
people famously understand that we get Social Security out of the New Deal. We get labor laws
out of the New Deal, but one of the big things the US got out of the New Deal was an entirely new
way of using credit to govern. And one of the things that happened under FDR is that this
approach of the government being involved in credit markets that had started with the farmers
was now being expanded across the economy.
00:13:27
Sarah Quinn
Chris Cillizza
And according to Monica Prasad, a professor at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern
University, the big push of the US government into the mortgage business is really a story about
pigs and production.
00:13:39
Monica Prasad
There was this episode in 1933 when the United States destroyed millions of perfectly healthy
pigs. Middle of the Great Depression, lots of people are hungry, so this just blows people's minds.
It wasn't just pigs, it was also all kinds of other agricultural products. Coffee was being dumped,
wheat was being destroyed. Oranges, sugar, tobacco, cotton. All of these things were just being
destroyed. And for some reason, it was the pigs that really hit people's nerves. And so there was
this outcry about why is this happening? There are so many hungry people. Why is the country
doing this? And it turns out that it actually made this kind of relentless, logical sense. The problem
was that American farmers had been so productive that they had glutted the market. And this
meant that prices for all of these things were falling, just really drastically falling from something
like $16 to about $3 for the pigs, for example. So then the logical thing to do, if there's too much
stuff on the market, is to destroy it. So this is what was happening. They were destroying these
products to keep prices up. And what it led to was just this incredible reckoning about political
economy in the U.S..
00:14:53
Chris Cillizza
Monica Prasad
Chris Cillizza
Monica Prasad
Chris Cillizza
Sarah Quinn
Chris Cillizza
This might sound pretty shocking. We had people lining up outside of soup kitchens during the
Great Depression, and meanwhile we were destroying food, being grown on American farmland
and here's why. There was so much food being produced at this time that farmers couldn't sell
their crops for enough money to make a profit or to pay off their debts. It's kind of the opposite of
the inflation crisis we find ourselves in now. Today, if prices for food and houses and cars and gas
get too high, the federal government will raise interest rates so we spend and borrow less. The
basic idea is to force costs to go down. Raising rates leads to spiking credit card interest rates
and mortgage interest rates. Anyway, back to the Great Depression. This period is when we start
to see the beginning of that kind of direct government involvement. Back then, since we were too
good at producing things, the government was actively trying to come up with more and more
ways to get people to consume things.
00:15:50
And then the question was, Well, how are we going to get rid of all this stuff? We've got all of this
amazing capitalist machinery that is producing things and it's running into trouble. Consumption
became the problem of the time. How do we get people to consume? And this is actually where
mortgages of the kind that we know start. So, of course, there had been mortgages before then.
There had been people borrowing. But the kind of mortgage that we're familiar with where you
pay maybe 20% down and then borrow a lot of money to pay off the rest of it over several
decades that comes out of this problem of under consumption or overproduction. The idea there
is that mortgages are going to get everyone to buy a house. This will lead to a huge boom in
construction. The construction industry will get going again and this will be a way to revive the
economy. So the 1930 is around when we start to see the development of the of the mortgage as
we currently know it, it becomes the center of American life, really. I mean, people literally
organize their lives. People orient their lives towards getting that first house and getting that first
house is grabbing the first rung of the ladder of economic mobility.
00:17:08
The period before and after World War II is when you really start to see the idea of the American
dream crystallized around homeownership, new cars and the whole nine yards. And a lot of this
was driven by government policies passed to help people purchase more stuff in order to keep
the economy humming. But access to credit still wasn't available to everyone.
00:17:29
So first of all, you only get access to credit if creditors think you can pay, right. So credit, it's kind
of an odd thing if you think about it. Someone's just going to give you a lot of money and you're
just going to promise to kind of pay it off so that we kind of take for granted now happens
because of this, you know, the credit scoring system and things like that. And then because of
the specific racism of the time, African-Americans did not have access to credit in this way. And
this is a very specific way in which the discriminations of prior generation are still with us today,
because credit access is something that comes down through the generations.
00:18:11
The expansion of the home mortgage business was coupled with a discriminatory policy called
redlining that prevented black families from this path to the middle class. In short, the newly
created and government backed Homeowners Loan Corporation or HOLC, created maps of
neighborhoods and communities all around the country. They determined which neighborhoods
were valuable and eligible for credit and sometimes drew literal red lines around the ones that
were in neighborhoods that were mostly or entirely white or considered valuable, neighborhoods
with minority communities or not. Here's how Sarah Quinn explains it.
00:18:45
So we get a total reorganization of the U.S. housing market. Now, what we know from scholars is
that this reorganization is done in an incredibly racist ways. The HOLC is going to kind of adopt
and perfect and officially consecrate the use of racist maps that assume that to be a valuable
neighborhood it has to be white, that whiteness is associated with property value. This becomes
part of how white flight is financed. This becomes a huge part of how you have an entire
generation of white families starting to build wealth through homes that they're going to later use
to start businesses and pay for education. And you have people of color and locked out of this
opportunity.
00:19:35
Here's Monica Prasad again.
Monica Prasad
Chris Cillizza
Monica Prasad
Chris Cillizza
Chris Cillizza
Emily Flitter
00:19:37
So if you have a house, you can bequeath it to your kids or you can help them buy their own
house. So, you know, if you're helping them with that down payment, it's actually makes a huge
difference. This means that your grandkids are going to grow up in a nice, safe neighborhood with
probably a good school attached to it, you know, because of the property taxes. If your parents
did not have that $10,000 to help because they were excluded because of these racial
restrictions, then your kids are not going to grow up in that nice neighborhood with that nice
school. So this is something that really reverberates through the generations. And we are literally
living with the consequences of these policies because parents do give to their children and to
their grandchildren. And this means that the ability of the parents of the grandparents to get that
first house are literally things that we are feeling today.
00:20:33
Homeownership was a path to other forms of wealth and credit, too. In the 1950s, you start to see
the emergence of the first credit cards in the U.S., enabling people who didn't have or carry cash
to pay for things on credit. But until the 1970s, access to credit cards was primarily limited to
well-off white men. To apply for a credit card to begin with, many banks required women to get
their husbands signatures on the applications, which meant that single women were out of luck.
00:21:00
This was just 50 years ago, actually. In the 1970s, you could not apply for a credit card under your
own name without your husband if you were a woman. It's a kind of practice that I think if we
saw it in Saudi Arabia, we'd be horrified.
00:21:14
It's crazy to me that if my mom wanted to apply for a credit card right before I was born, she
would have needed my dad's signature. In 1974, Congress finally passed the Equal Credit
Opportunity Act, which prohibited credit access discrimination based on race, sex, marital status
and religion. But for the first 200 years of American history, that kind of discrimination was the
norm. Most of American wealth and prosperity was built on credit, and only a select few had
access to it. After the break, well, imagine a world in which credit doesn't exist.
00:22:03
Welcome back to Downside Up, I'm Chris Cillizza and today we're looking at what the world
would look like without credit. Emily Flitter covers banking and Wall Street for The New York
Times and is the author of "The White Wall How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America." She says
that for a lot of people, this isn't just a thought experiment. It's a reality. The United States has a
much broader system of credit than many parts of the world.
00:22:26
There are other countries where credit doesn't work the way it works in the United States, and it's
really, really hard to buy a car or a house. Without credit and reasonable loans, we would
definitely have a lot less economic activity and a lot less economic mobility.
00:22:47
Chris Cillizza
And as we discussed earlier in the show, there are still plenty of Americans who don't have
access to credit.
00:22:53
Emily Flitter
The way it is now, it's like some people are living in a world without credit and they're all around
us and we don't even know how hard their lives are. It's the 21st century and there are still people
who are trying to live life without credit.
00:23:10
Chris Cillizza
The Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which as we said earlier, is supposed to ban credit access
discrimination based on race, sex, marital status and religion has made it easier for more people
to borrow funds from banks. But so much of our access to credit still relies on an individual's
credit history, how and when we pay back our bills, and what previous loans we've taken on.
00:23:31
Emily Flitter
I can give you an example. At the beginning of the pandemic, there was an effort by Congress to
give aid to small businesses, but they didn't just want to be handing out checks left and right.
They needed a vetting system and they turned to the banks. And that was the Paycheck
Protection Program. Small business owners had to apply for essentially loans that the banks had
to give them using government money that the borrowers would never end up having to repay. So
it's an aid distribution program, but it's structured like a bank loan. And the whole point was to
have banks vet borrowers. Black business owners at the beginning of the pandemic had such a
hard time getting these loans. And I met one business owner in Baltimore, her name was Yasmin,
and she had started her own hair salon. She did so much work to get this salon going, including
learning how to do basic plumbing, which I would never try to do by myself.
00:24:34
Chris Cillizza
Me neither.
00:24:34
Emily Flitter
And she saved and scrimped and paid for everything herself and had a checking account, and it
was a business checking account. And so she figured that by the time her business was up and
running, she should go get a business credit card so she could start just having a smoother time
buying supplies and things like that. So she went to the branch where she had opened the
business checking account and said, I want to get a credit card. And the person she spoke to at
the branch said, you know, I just think with your credit score, you're not going to qualify for a card
with us. You should probably look somewhere else.
00:25:13
Chris Cillizza
Credit scores are basically an algorithm that banks use to determine how likely a customer will
be able to pay back alone. But so much of how that score is calculated is tied up in the same
historic inequality that our guests described earlier in the show.
00:25:26
Emily Flitter
So Jasmine had not filled out an application and been rejected. She had just had a conversation
in which the banker discouraged her from even applying. Her credit score was just the score of
someone who grew up pretty poor, went to college, you know, lots of kids in college run up credit
card debt or do whatever. And I don't know the specifics. She said that, you know, she just had
been a young kid and had no rich relatives to bail her out and so her credit score was like pretty
bad. And nothing that she had done since, including having this successful business, had fixed it.
00:26:07
So Jasmine ends up going to another bank and getting a credit card instead.
00:26:11
Chris Cillizza
Emily Flitter
No problem at the time, except that when the PPP was launched, the banks said basically, we're
not going to give a hip loan to non-customers. And what they meant was they didn't want to lend
to anyone who hadn't already gotten a loan from them, whom they already hadn't vetted.
00:26:30
Chris Cillizza
So Jasmine went to her original bank, the one that denied her a credit card, and she applied for a
PPP loan. And that bank told her that she wasn't eligible for a loan because she hadn't
established a line of credit with them. Then she went to her new bank and they told her that
despite having a credit card with them, she's not really a customer because she doesn't bank
with them. And they also denied her a loan. And so she was boxed out of one of the major
financial life rafts provided by the government during the pandemic, the PPP loan.
00:26:58
Emily Flitter
That's what happens over and over again. It's not that these banks said you are black, therefore
you cannot have a loan. But all of the ways they function are designed and the history of redlining
and outright discrimination and the Jim Crow era have created this situation where black
customers just cannot fit into the traditional banking system.
00:27:25
Chris Cillizza
And one of the weird side effects of the American economy being so built on credit is that many
of us wind up paying for a lot of major services, from mortgage payments to college admission
fees on credit. So much so that it's hard for sociologist Sarah Quinn to think of an alternative.
00:27:41
Sarah Quinn
So one of the main theories about why US has so early on had such extensive credit markets is
because the U.S. had such an underdeveloped welfare state that Americans turned to credit to
provide the kind of security that if you were in Europe, you would have had more options for the
the nation you were in to help take care of your housing and your food needs. One way to think
about it is that every society decides for itself, has to decide, I mean, this is like the core question
of political autonomy. Groups of people decide how you're going to get your needs met, basic
needs where you live. What about health care? What about education? What about food? And
you can arrange that in lots of different ways.
00:28:27
Sarah Quinn
And you can arrange it so that it's based on reciprocity that we owe each other, you know,
through a gift exchange. You can do it that everybody who's a member of that society has a share
of some basic rights that everyone is entitled to. You can say that the way you do all of those
things or most of those things is through the market. And then if you're in the market, you can say
we're doing it more or less through credit. You could have it. So it's done through markets, but you
have laws and rules. And this was, you know, part of U.S. history when we're talking about a lot of
the postwar golden age of U.S. capitalism, there were rules and different levels of inequality that
pushed up wages that made it so that you didn't need credit cards so much.
00:29:10
In other words, because America lacks the same sort of social safety net you might see in parts
of Europe, for example, people rack up debt in the U.S. to cover the cost of basic needs. If we
couldn't purchase things on credit, could we figure out another way to take care of each other?
00:29:25
We could have rules for parts of our society, for all of our society that just like we just don't use
lending for this. A lot of activists are arguing for this right now with schools. We're in a world now
where we need higher education. There's been a change in the kind of jobs that we do. People
need to go to college, and if so, we should publicly fund and we should not ask people to go into
debt for it. A lot of the debate about student loan debt relief is really a debate about like, how is
this part of education fitting into our economy and who's supposed to pay for it? Is it the group or
the individual? And then, if so, on what terms?
00:30:02
And in some ways, you can see a parallel between the government relieving the debts of settlers
in the 1800s or farmers in the 1900s and the government's proposed relief of student loan debts
today, it's driven by the type of behavior governments wanted to encourage from their citizens,
whether it's cultivating land or to go to school to compete in a 21st century economy. Right now,
credit is the system we rely on for that.
00:30:26
So if I think about what does a world without credit look like? I think it looks like either people are
deeply suffering because they have no option when they are without material resources or a
world where there's a lot of social support and people don't need credit because there are other
social systems they're provisioning for them.
00:30:53
Chris Cillizza
Sarah Quinn
Chris Cillizza
Sarah Quinn
Chris Cillizza
Monica Prasad
Monica Prasad believes that even with the flaws in the system, our ability to offer each other
credit is a net good.
00:31:00
In the wake of the financial crisis, my students sometimes would say, Well, can't we just get rid of
credit? Why do we even need credit? Why have this immense sector that seems to actually be
doing more harm than good? Right? I mean, I think the world is better off with credit rather than
without it, because if you've got a great idea for a business but you have no money, there's
someone else who's got a lot of money but no time or no ideas for what to do with it, it benefits
both of you to put both of you together, right, so that the one person can actually take advantage
of this this capital and do something with it. People sometimes say, well, you borrowed this big
amount, what about when you have to pay it back? But the idea is that if you used that credit,
well, you would be paying it back from a future that is much richer than if you hadn't borrowed
that money. All that said, whether the levels of finance that we have in this country are
reasonable, nobody really knows the answer to that because we're kind of in uncharted territory.
This level of financialization is historically new. So, you know, whether it's all a bubble or not, we
don't know.
Chris Cillizza
00:32:08
Throughout American history, some forms of credit have offered borrowers a path to prosperity.
But we've also built a system where not all borrowers are created equal and where some of us
live and die based on our credit scores. And so when credit card interest rates or mortgage
interest rates spike, the American dream can seem much harder to attain. It's hard to imagine a
world without credit, but maybe we also don't need to rely on credit as much as we do.
00:32:41
Chris Cillizza
And now it's time for Sarah Quin to join us for a little credit and currency trivia. Question one:
What currency is the oldest in the world? It's been in continuous circulation for roughly 1200
years. What currency would that be?
00:33:00
Sarah Quinn
Oh, I don't know.
00:33:01
Chris Cillizza
The British pound. Isn't that cool? 1200 years. It's not the American dollar.
00:33:07
Sarah Quinn
No, no, it would not be the American. I mean, the thing is, is what I didn't know is if there was
something older than the pound.
00:33:13
Chris Cillizza
Okay. Question two. In 1887, utopian sci fi novel by Edward Bellamy was called "Looking
Backward." It was one of the bestselling American novels of the 19th century. It may also be the
first recorded use of what two word phrase that we have talked about a lot today in this
conversation, what two word phrase was in that book?
00:33:34
Sarah Quinn
Two word phrase that we've talked about. Credit score?
00:33:39
Credit card. I'm giving you half credit. Question three An episode of this sci fi TV series imagines a
dystopian world in which people socioeconomic status is determined by a social credit ranking
system named this critically acclaimed series.
00:33:57
Black Mirror.
00:33:59
Correct. Nailed it.
00:34:00
Chris Cillizza
Sarah Quinn
Chris Cillizza
Sarah Quinn
Great episode.
00:34:03
Chris Cillizza
Yup. It's terrifying.
00:34:04
Sarah Quinn
It's also, I think, the future that we're headed into.
00:34:07
Chris Cillizza
Really? That dystopian?
00:34:10
Well, I think there's potential. I mean, if you talk to people who are studying with the social credit
system in China, all sorts of things are rated a can control your ability to travel. Yeah, bad things
can happen.
00:34:23
Yeah, well, that's scary.
00:34:24
Sarah Quinn
Chris Cillizza
Sarah Quinn
Yeah.
00:34:26
Chris Cillizza
Okay. Question four the company that would eventually become Visa was started as a subsidiary
of what major American bank.
00:34:35
I don't know. Visa. Let me think. Was it JPMorgan Chase?
00:34:42
Good guess. Bank of America.
00:34:44
Sarah Quinn
Chris Cillizza
Sarah Quinn
Bank of America.
00:34:45
Chris Cillizza
It actually began as BankAmericard in 1958, it was later spun off and officially became Visa in
1976. That is a hard one.
00:34:51
Sarah Quinn
Bank of America that almost closed and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation helped bail it
out.
00:34:57
Chris Cillizza
Really? Wow. When was that?
00:35:00
Sarah Quinn
I would have to go back and check the data, but it's part of the kind of New Deal Reconstruction
Finance Corporation.
00:35:08
Chris Cillizza
Jeez. That is amazing.
00:35:08
Sarah Quinn
At the time, it was called Bank of America National Trust and Savings Association. The RFC lent
the Bank of America 15 million, but later increases this amount to 30 million, eventually lending a
total of 65 million starting in the early 1970s.
00:35:24
Chris Cillizza
Holy cow. I did not know that. Okay, last one. This is more pop culture than it is credit and
currency. In this holiday movie released in 1992, a young child uses his father's credit card to run
up a $967 room service bill at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Name that film.
00:35:44
Sarah Quinn
This is Home Alone, correct?
00:35:46
Chris Cillizza
Correct. It's Home Alone 2 but we're giving you credit for Home Alone. Well done.
00:35:50
Sarah Quinn
Thanks.
00:35:51
Keep the change, you filthy animal.
00:35:56
Clip from Home Alone 2
Chris Cillizza
Thank you to Sarah Quinn for playing along, and thank you to Monica Prasad and Emily Flitter for
giving us a lesson in how credit fits into America's foundational history and for helping us imagine
a world without credit. Thank you also for listening to the final episode of our first season of
Downside Up. One of the reasons why I wanted to do this show and one of the things that has
continued to fascinate me is that if you tweak one little thing about our world, like if credit or
flavor or mosquitoes or plastic or domesticated dogs never existed, our entire reality might look
completely different. What about you? What are the hypothetical and bizarre questions that keep
you up at night? Let me know by tweeting me at Chris Cillizza. And if you've enjoyed our show
and want to see us come back for another season, please share it with your friends and make
sure you rate review and subscribe as well.
00:36:50
Chris Cillizza
Downside Up is hosted by me, Chris Cillizza. It's a production of CNN in collaboration with Pod
People. At CNN our producer is Lori Galarreta and our executive producer is Abbie Fentress
Swanson. Alexander McCall leads audience strategy for the show Tameeka Ballance-Kolasny is
our production manager and Jamus Andrest and Nichole Pesaru designed our artwork. The team
from Pod People includes Rachael King, Matt Sav, Aimee Machado, John Hammontree, Madison
Lusby, Regina de Heer and Morgane Fouse. Theme and original music composed by Casey
Holford. Additional music came from epidemic sound. Special thanks to Lindsay Abrams. Fuzz
Hogan, Drew Shankman, Lisa Namerow, John Dianora, Katie Hinman, Robert Mathers and Sarina
Singh.
00:37:31
Until next time, thanks for joining me in a world turned Downside Up.
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