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I bought a house recently and learned how in Canada you literally cannot buy a house you can't afford if your finances are stressed. They test your income for a hypothetical rate hike and your payments must not exceed a certain percentage of your income. There's other safeties too, such as requiring 5% down but significantly incentivising putting >= 20% down.

Can we not have the same kind of thing for all loans? Ie. It becomes illegal to lend money with terms that the borrower cannot reasonably afford?

On another note:

"Over 10 months, The Times interviewed 450 people, built a database of every medallion sale since 1995 and reviewed thousands of individual loans and other documents, including internal bank records and confidential profit-sharing agreements."

From this I finally grokked what I'm paying for, and just subscribed to my first periodical.




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