Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit. James Scurlock D.
Читать онлайн книгу.
treaded a little more carefully—at least for a couple of decades.5
Wriston had been humbled, but he never abandoned his audacious growth ambitions. Indeed, failure seems to have sharpened his sense of focus. Now there was only one market that could approach the scale he needed to produce that double-digit growth he’d promised, but that market, the American middle class, was unavailable by virtue of regulation. The solution was obvious: Get rid of the laws. For that to happen, both the banking industry and its customers would have to be radically reprogrammed.
Wriston hired Robert Kennedy’s Harvard roommate to head up a new lobbying effort designed to obliterate any law which restricted his bank’s activities. He couched his new crusade in terms of personal frustration and a fervent patriotism. Sears, JCPenney, and a host of other large retailers, he pointed out, were charging 18 percent a month on their store credit cards, while Citibank was restricted to charging roughly half that amount. Why should retailers be allowed to act like banks and charge pawnshop rates, while banks were prevented from acting like banks? It didn’t make any sense. Armed with considerable moral influence as the world’s leading banker (these were the days before financial executive equaled scandal) as well as an unflagging and convenient belief that banks should be allowed to do whatever they wanted (this was America, by God, let freedom ring!) and, most important, a remarkably limited deference to history, Wriston set out to conquer the American middle class.
Over the previous ten years Hock had stayed busy popularizing the means to Wriston’s end: a tiny plastic card that was already being used by millions and that would soon be ubiquitous. For all of the problems Hock had encountered, getting people to use the card had never been one of them. There was something seductive—addictive, even—about instant credit. The challenges were technological in nature: making transactions faster, processing more efficient, and the brand more recognizable. But Hock had made impressive progress on all of these fronts. Computers were becoming more and more powerful. Telecommunications had reduced the time needed for an authorization from minutes to seconds. Hock had convinced the stodgy old guys to rename their BankAmericard “Visa” because it was one of the only words whose definition and pronunciation were the same everywhere in the civilized world. The Promised Land was in sight.
Wriston, meanwhile, laid out his own vision of the Promised Land—a land in which millions of customers charged all of their purchases to a Citibank credit card and paid high, unregulated interest rates and fees for the privilege. A land where the same government that had indirectly bailed out his company was told that any oversight was equivalent to socialism. A land where he could operate anywhere he damned well pleased. Wriston attacked a half century of tradition from his phallic bully pulpit in midtown Manhattan, agitating and cajoling his way out of the straitjacket of regulation that constrained his grand ambitions.
Wriston’s and Hock’s separate visions were on a collision course, yet they turned out to be a brilliant tag team. At no time was this more evident than when Hock decided to re-brand the BankAmericard as Visa in the mid-1970s—a giant step toward universality. Millions of BankAmericard customers were sent letters explaining that their “new” Visa card would soon arrive in the mail and instructing them to destroy their “old” BankAmericard, even though the two cards were identical in every aspect except the artwork. Back then, an outsized Visa logo occupied the front of the card while the name of the customer’s bank—the institution that issued the card—was printed in very small letters on the back. Not very many people bothered to look at the fine print on the back, and it didn’t take a genius to realize that customers would rush to use the first shiny new Visa card that arrived.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.