In the latest episode of Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver covered the American problem of debt-buying. Oliver pointed out what was wrong with the industry and how little it was regulated or governed by laws.
Wait, what's debt-buying? It's a business where a company buys outstanding debts from a creditor at a fraction of the amount owed. If the company can then recover even some of the debt, it makes a neat profit. According to Oliver, it's a huge but problematic business.
To prove his point, Oliver personally bought debt worth $15 million, owed by over 9,000 people, for his company Central Asset Recovery Professionals – or CARP, after the bottom-feeding fish. Except he paid only $60,000 for it. Oliver then proceeded to "forgive" the debts for those 9,000 people, who will no longer have to pay up the $15 million they owed collectively.
In the episode, Oliver explains that American households are over $12 trillion dollars in debt. By way of comparison, India's GDP is a little over $2 trillion dollars. And of that $12 trillion, $436 billion is seriously delinquent – 90 days or more past its due date.
And unlike Hollywood actor Nicholas Cage who fell into debt by purchasing islands, castles and dinosaur skulls, most people sink into debt through no fault of their own, especially when faced with a sudden medical problem.
Explains Oliver, "This isn't someone spending $80,000 on this Versace coat that looks like a banana f***ed a Rorschach test. This is someone spending $80,000 to breathe."
So what happens when these debts become delinquent? Well, the creditor can sell them off to debt-buying companies at a low price, recovering whatever little they can instead of writing off the loans entirely. These debt-buying companies can be set up with little or no regulation.
They then try to get back more than they had paid, pursing the recovery debts even after the statute of limitations has run out, which means the case can no longer be taken to court. Often, these companies use extra-legal methods.
The outcome, explains Oliver: a billion-dollar industry that entirely consists of predatory companies purchasing this debt cheaply. The largest of these companies, according to Oliver, is a group named Encore, which claims that one out of five consumers in the US has owed them or will owe them money. "Statistically that means one member of Evanescence has owed them money,” Oliver jokes, referring to the American rock band that has seen numerous changes in its line-up.
But the story doesn't end when the debt has been forgiven, the way Oliver did. For, there is zombie debt. Unlike zombies on shows like The Walking Dead, they might not eat brain, but they certainly give you a headache, says Oliver, by coming back to haunt the debtors because of these debt buying companies.
"There would be absolutely nothing wrong with that except for the fact that absolutely everything is wrong with that," Oliver concludes. "We need much clearer rules and oversight."
A related question: was Oliver's $15-million gift, for which he paid only $60,000, the biggest gift ever made on a TV show? Probably not. In 2004, Oprah Winfrey gave away a Pontiac G6 sedan to each of the 276 members of the audience at one particular episode of the show. With each car costing just under $60,000, the value of the gifts was $16.56 million.
Here's the video of that giveaway.
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