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Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

Give me a break. Even if the credit scoring system incentivizes you to keep accounts open, it doesn’t incentivize you to use them. In fact, having too large a balance on your credit cards (i.e. too much usage) is a negative factor in your credit rating.

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It was very weird for me when I moved to the US as an adult, and had to explicitly open "credit lines" and actively use them to build "history". In Germany, using "credit" for anything less than a house or a new car seemed rather heavily discouraged to me.

It was weird for me when I traveled to Germany and had to pay for almost everything in cash because the country doesn’t like electronic payments. What’s your point?

My point was that just keeping negative records, instead of forcing people to open credit lines to build history, seems to work out very well in other parts of the world. And so there may be a point to the assertion that this system of having to build "history" is to incentivize credit usage.

I don't see what electronic payment usage has to do with it. There is electronic payment usage in Germany, but it's almost entirely debit cards. The reluctance to use electronic payment at all has nothing to do with whether it's one or the other.

Sorry if this was not clear, but I did not say you have to use credit cards.

You said this was an incentive for consumers to “[keep] multiple credit cards, etc. on which banks make money”.

Banks don’t make money off credit cards which are not being used.

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