A higher credit line

BLM:90 WHM:90 SMN:90 THF:90 WAR:90 DRK:90 RNG:90 PLD:90

I used to feel bad talking about Russians because it seemed like they had reached a level of civilization that was equal to us.  That was probably what Putin intended when he made his "exceptionalism" remark.  He intended to make clear we were separate now, uneven... BOTH exceptional.

I don't feel so bad now. 

If a customer calls and needs a credit line increase, we need to check his credit bureau to see if there is any recent activity. This doesn't mean we HAVE to check it, means it's prudent to check.

But customers soon started to realize that credit bureaus noticed this "activity" and began to use the inquiries to justify lowering the score. After all, there are "possible" credit lines being approved after every inquiry which justify the lower score because of the customer becoming a higher credit risk.

You see, if you have few credit lines open, you appear to be a lower risk but as you open more, the risk gets higher.

So customers began to complain and since we were in the business of good customer service, we began to find a way to approve "slighter" increases just based on our own history. A bad practice yes, but good service makes for free advertising and frankly, a higher total past due customers was probably what the "big wigs" were hoping for, despite the ethics of it.

And as soon as the whole receivables market opened up, which took past due customers "off our hands" at a cost, we had not just a few past due customers but a whole BUNCH of past due customers... for some reason.

Oh... so where I'm going with this is that as customers asked for help we gave them help that caused them to go past due because it was sneaky like that to have a higher credit line that didn't show up on their bureau as an inquiry but that they eventually found out they couldn't afford and it was kinda our fault... though it wasn't.

And that's Russia now. We are "helping" them but in the end they are gonna end up messing themselves up. They are taking risks that they think we are approving JUST BETWEEN US, but if they had let us run it by the United Nations, they would know it was too much of a risk or they might have been approved the credit line, but instead now they have this SECRET credit line that they know they shouldn't have and that they, because it can be taken away at any time, are going to run up to the limit in a form of "burning your oil wells".

... in my opinion.