Abstract
Credit Where It’s Due: Rethinking Financial Citizenship tells the story of the Mission Asset Fund, a nonprofit that seeks to expand access to credit in dignity-affirming ways. Written by Frederick F. Wherry, Kristin S. Seefeldt, and Anthony S. Alvarez, the book opens with a short but engaging forward by José Quiñonez, the Mission Asset Fund’s founder and director. That tells you something about the book’s commitments. This is a case study that approaches the Mission Asset Fund on its own terms and forefronts what scholars can learn from people who are already doing the hard work of building a more just financial system.
Lending circles are the centerpiece of the Mission Asset Fund’s work. Members of these circles contribute a mutually agreed upon amount, usually $100, in order to create a pool of savings that they later take turns borrowing from without interest. While participants commit to making regular contributions, the Mission Asset Fund itself commits to guaranteeing the payouts and, beyond that, to treating all members with respect. The Fund’s staff understands that financial struggles are caused by a lack of money, not a lack of character. Missed payments set in motion a conversation with staff and a new plan of action, not a notch down in credit score that will haunt the client for years to come. In this way, the Mission Asset Fund connects the old tradition of the lending circle to the contemporary financialized context in which credit scores determine access to more and more parts of social life.
Many of the Mission Asset Fund’s clients are immigrants. Its Dreamers program helps college-age students pay fees associated with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) application. The book’s authors argue that these clients should able to secure not just political citizenship but also a better sort of financial citizenship. In the same way that T. H. Marshall long ago posited a set of social rights for citizens, Wherry, Seefeldt and Alvarez now posit a set of rights for economic participation that can be used as a yardstick to measure the decency of specific financial arrangements. Financial citizenship has four components: freedom from exploitation, the right to respect, the right to belong, and the right to participate in the creation of the institutions of commerce. These rights translate into concrete practices like protections from high interest rates, pernicious bank fees, debt traps, and subprime contracts. They mean relief from degradation and humiliation at the hands of bill collectors. And they mean more democratic accountability built into the financial system. This focus on financial citizenship allows the book to support a broad vision of credit justice, as opposed to a narrower vision of inclusion into a financial system whose long history of exploitation of Black and brown borrowers remains unchanged.
Empirically, the book situates the Mission Asset Fund’s work in a broader political and historical context. The first chapter provides the history of the organization and explains the need for its services. It explains how credit scores systematically discount the kinds of bills and payments that poorer families regularly make on time, resulting in a group of people who are “credit invisibles.” The resulting exclusion from credit markets forms a lasting barrier between a person and a car loan, a business loan, or a mortgage. This is a particularly difficult problem for immigrants whose previous work and loan histories are entirely ignored and for undocumented immigrants, for whom any focused attention is potentially dangerous if it draws in the wrong kind of authorities. Chapter Two traces the deeper historical context of financial inequality in the United States, summarizing the history of racist exclusion in credit markets from the catastrophic loss of Black wealth in the Freedman’s Bank through the post-World War II expansion of redlining and the failures of the Community Reinvestment Act to address racial inequity in lending.
The third and fourth chapters of the book forefront clients’ previous experiences with lending. Members of the Fund’s Lending Circles discuss past struggles with hidden and costly bank fees and the seductions of easy access to credit cards in college. Members who have immigrated to the United States explain how big lenders simply ignore their previous financial records. Other clients discuss how hard it is to save money when they want to provide their children with a “normal” childhood or provide extra care for aging parents. These chapters lay out the stakes of financial belonging and the importance of a relational approach to understanding money. From this perspective, the fight for credit justice can be seen as a kind of deprograming from the neoliberal logic that always shifts blame onto the individual and that ignores the broader context of social needs and historical exclusions. Countering this neoliberal logic, the book shows how attention to social and historical context puts the onus of responsibility for poverty back on inequalities. This recasts personal credit histories as records of the very reasonable pursuit of social connection amid a lack of resources. In the book’s concluding chapter, the relational approach becomes grounds for a set of policy recommendations that allow for both dignity and participation, including expanded short-term loan facilities, baby bonds, and postal banking.
There is a moment at the start of Chapter One where José Quiñonez testifies to Congress about Mission Asset Fund’s successes in support of broader financial reforms. Credit Where It’s Due can be read as a kind of companion piece to that testimony itself, focused and compact enough to be readily handed off to the busiest staffer. It is the rare book on the economy written with economy: it gets to its points quickly, presents them clearly and forcefully, and lays out policy options at the end. These qualities, which make the book especially useful for the policy crowd, also lend it to teaching. Scholars, students, and lawmakers can all learn from the Mission Asset Fund and the authors’ thoughtful and compelling engagement with it. In this way, the book itself works as a kind of signpost marking the way forward in the long path toward credit justice.