Available From UC Press

Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Fall Release in Business and Economics​

A consumer credit industry insider-turned-outsider explains how banks lure Americans deep into debt, and how to break the cycle.
 
Delinquent takes readers on a journey from Capital One’s headquarters to street corners in Detroit, kitchen tables in Sacramento, and other places where debt affects people's everyday lives. Uncovering the true costs of consumer credit to American families in addition to the benefits, investigative journalist Elena Botella—formerly an industry insider who helped set credit policy at Capital One—reveals the underhanded and often predatory ways that banks induce American borrowers into debt they can’t pay back.
 
Combining Botella’s insights from the banking industry, quantitative data, and research findings as well as personal stories from interviews with indebted families around the country, Delinquent provides a relatable and humane entry into understanding debt. Botella exposes the ways that bank marketing, product design, and customer management strategies exploit our common weaknesses and fantasies in how we think about money, and she also demonstrates why competition between banks has failed to make life better for Americans in debt. Delinquent asks: How can we make credit available to those who need it, responsibly and without causing harm? Looking to the future, Botella presents a thorough and incisive plan for reckoning with and reforming the industry.

Elena Botella was a Senior Business Manager at Capital One, where she ran the company’s Secured Card credit card and taught credit risk management. Her writing has appeared in The New Republic, Slate, American Banker, and The Nation.
 

"In this rare glimpse behind the curtains that typically shield private banks and lenders from public scrutiny, we learn about the decisions these companies make to keep people in debt. We learn about debt as a punishing edge of capitalism’s spear, wielded by private banks and lenders."—Terri Friedline, author of Banking on a Revolution: Why Financial Technology Won't Save a Broken System

"We rarely get an inside peek into how our corporate overseers plot to separate ordinary people from their money. Armed with years of knowledge from sitting in those meetings, Elena Botella has delivered fresh insights into the most seemingly innocuous of predatory financial schemes: credit cards, a product too many of us use without thinking about the implications."—David Dayen, author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power