Dealers offered easy credit, there were trading opportunities at every price range, and the district even had a short-lived stamp exchange modeled after its Wall Street counterpart.
Junkets take advance payments on the mainland and offer easy credit across the border, allowing clients to far exceed Beijing's limits.
The resulting bankruptcy boom could send shockwaves back up the financial food chain, as hedge funds and banks that offered easy credit to high-risk borrowers suddenly find themselves awash in bad debt.
The late Hyman Minsky, an economist, argued that this relationship would naturally lead to bubbles, as easier credit standards pushed up property prices and higher prices encouraged banks to offer easier credit terms.But when property prices fall, both the debtor and the creditor can suffer; the debtor loses his equity while the creditor has to write down the value of the loan.
But the key thing they need to learn is to say no to offers of easy credit from banks or predatory payday lenders.
Daimler's move has left the Mitsubishi group of companies scrambling to draw up a new rescue plan for Mitsubishi Motors, which suffered heavy losses in a failed attempt to increase its sales in the United States with offers of easy credit terms on auto loans.
The most women could hope for was to be cast as victims of an evil system, as in Zola's "The Ladies Paradisee," about a greedy merchant who designs a dazzling department store in Paris to overwhelm women into overspending (a 125-year-old parallel to today's easy credit offers).
DURING one particularly nasty agricultural recession, as farmer after farmer was forced to abandon the land, Congress reached out to help, creating a company to offer them easier credit, the same way it had made mortgages cheaper and more plentiful for millions of homeowners.
The number of bankruptcies filed annually has been rising steadily despite the boom economy -- in part, consumer advocates say, because so much easy credit is offered to so many people by the credit card industry and others.
The enclosed letter from Citibank spelled out the wonders of easy credit and offered him a Visa card.
