...people (not you, I just think it's fitting) often think that being lax on credit is helping the poor or making the world a better place by some kind of self-enforced redistribution.
It is, however, far better to have strong contractual and property institutions while caring for those in need with well established legal and economic structures. (This could be a full welfare state, but could also be any other set of policies targeting the same problem.)
I have, for example, strong feelings about the idea that there are some loans you can't default on. But if that turns out to be a societal problem it needs to be solved there, not through a lack of enforcement for the few who leave the country.
Is this risk not the reason interest is charged? If you want perfect enforcement of all loans, interest must go to 0, otherwise the interest is pure profit.
And you can not complain about any random company nuking your credit rating to zero after failed automatic payment. Seems only logical.
Had a friend who ran into that after Bell Canada billed his closed account. I was like "and what so?," but the guy was almost moved to tears.
Before that, I never gave regard to people telling that "you should be very cautious closing a bank account"
See also: "I was declared deceased three times and it destroyed my credit" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19656322 https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/bctflo/i_h...
You can also have ruined credit through no actions of your own, without knowing that you do, until that day you try to rent an apartment or a phone contract or whatever, and everywhere turns you down and you don't know why.
You can also have ruined credit, oddly, while having a large amount of savings at the same time. I don't know about other countries, but in the UK, the credit reference agencies don't keep track of bank deposits (even though they do keep track of bank overdrafts), so you can have say £100,000 in the bank, while being unable to get a £1000 limit credit card or £1000 loan (which you might choose if you wanted to keep the £100k in a tax-efficient account), not even at the same bank.
It's surprisingly easy to have a ruined credit rating through no fault of your own, without knowing, if you aren't obsessive about checking.
For example: When the credit reference agencies (CRAs) hold incorrect information about you. Or accounts that don't exist and which have entirely fictional transactions on them, which of course are never paid because they aren't real and start flagging as "overdue", because some utility leaves accounts that are closed open in the CRA files for years later, and then add bogus transactions years later, which magically disappear when you ask the company if you owe them anything (I'm looking at you BT).
In the UK, if your CRA record address doesn't match a local government address for you, there's quite a severe penalty to the credit score. Most people don't know that, but CRA data often has errors like that, which can be difficult to correct (I'm looking at you Equifax "it will take us 8 weeks to respond to your complaint, and please send us a copy of your passport").
Eventually you may find this out and call each of them individually to make a correction. And then find, each time you correct it, it periodically gets replaced with incorrect data automatically, because some system has an incorrect address database and uses it to automatically "improve" data back to the erroneous version (I'm looking at you Experian).
So not sure if what you say is the more social damaging scenario or the inverse...
Just pointing that across countries and cultures, human civilization has had a constant, throughout millennia, disfavor, of those lenting money, and of interest in particular.
That would completely eliminate the debt collection industry, secondary debt markets, credit reporting agencies, and so on.
But, raising taxes to pay for it is “too expensive”, so we pay orders of magnitude more in credit card processing fees, credit report monitoring, etc.
In fact, there's most of the money the banks loan is not "somebody else's" at all, it's "loan money".
https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofeconomics/chapter/27-4-how...
There is (in simple terms) as much money as people can reasonably borrow.