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Comment by kevinsync | Hacker News Reader

I cannot for the life of me find the article that explains this succinctly and with a hint of salience, but I recall reading sometime this year about how Klarna (a Swedish company) created the concept, in part, because the Swedish (culturally) tend to pay back their loans. It was a hit in its motherland, with little fraud and generally-responsible users. Then they went worldwide, in particular in America where we are a pack of jokers and heathens who are happy to finance a Crave Case and a vape with no intention of paying it back ever.

It apparently never occurred to them that we are like this.

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Cute story, but do you think a massive company that specializes in loans and credit would move to the largest credit market in the world with a 100 years of very detailed financial data and models about loans, delinquencies, defaults, bankruptcies, etc but “it never occurred to them” to check that?

I mean, that was the literal whole point of the article, that they were culturally caught off guard. It happens! I'm going to try to find it again and edit this with a link.

How does that account for the disgusting klarna ads I see in NYC that glorify buying things you cannot afford?

Either they got over their shock fast and learned how to take advantage of us, or it was the plan all along.

I’m not doubting the existence of such article. I’m asking you to engage some critical thinking and not accept whatever cute, PR or otherwise “fun” narrative you read anywhere.

It’s “fun” to think that Starbucks struggles in Italy is because they are dumb and didn’t realize that Italians have a long cultural tradition with coffee that’s very different than Americans. “Oh dumb Americans and dumb Starbucks. How stupid are they to try to sell espresso in the land of espresso lol”. You need to engage just a little bit of critical thinking and realize that Starbucks knew that well in advance and thought the would give it a shot anyway. Maybe they could occupy a different cultural niche just like they did in dozens of other countries with similarly rich cultural traditions around coffeeshops and coffee or tea like the Middle East and Asia.

Critical thinking is long gone from most, and this site is now popular enough, and cs is main stream enough, that a good majority of this site even barely thinks beyond what fluff was put in front of them.

Let’s dig a little deeper. Why isn’t education around the basics of finance mandatory in school?

My picture, may be wrong, is that not paying your loans is easier to get away with in the US. That you can just not pay and people will sigh and actually give up. While in Sweden people will hound you until they get their money.

Consider this:

> Klarna requires you to have a card filed with them and they will charge your card an exorbitant interest rate if you miss a payment. But on the other hand…if you cancel your card, or if you put in a temporary card from one of those temporary card services that auto-expires, what is Klarna going to do? They can’t, like, claw back the taco.

I think this is a case in point, this expectation that if you don't pay that's the end of it. Even in the US it's possible to recover the money with a lawsuit, and I wouldn't be surprised if Klarna starts making use of that possibility.

If I'm right, this would also explain not using traditional credit scores, as they are more a measure of whether you usually pay your debts on time, but what matters is whether you have the assets/income so that you can be made to pay your debts.

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