It reminded me of the time I spent in lending at car dealership. Particularly there was a bank called Santander that is a very large bank in Europe and did a lot of auto lending there. In the US they didn't try to compete with the banks and credit unions that lent to people with excellent, good, or average credit. Instead they would lend money to someone so long as they had a pulse. I would pull someone's credit and find that they had never bothered to make a payment a single time in their life and yet Santander would approve that loan, almost always with a rate in excess of 30%, and with a large down payment requirement. They would also always require proof of residency and 3 references. They knew that there was an extremely high chance that the person would not make payments on the car and that they would almost immediately start the repo process. What's crazy is that I actually had a handful of customers take that loan on a few occasions. These people would sometimes have the 15-30K down payment Santander required. I have no idea if the customers ended up keeping up on the loan or not. The point of the rant is that the markets are fairly effective. These customers wanted a loan and the bank was willing to take a big risk on people that were nightmarishly bad at managing their money. If Santander and banks like that didn't exist there would be a group of people that would never be able to get a loan on a car. Heck, there is an entire classification of car dealerships that offer these kind of on the spot loans as part of their business model. They are called buy here, pay here. The dealerships themselves offer the loans with 30-40% interest rates, but for very short periods of time, like 12 or 18 month loans. They always put a GPS tracker in the car and often have to go back and get the cars to find them absolutely trashed. Those dealerships offer a chance for someone with terrible credit or no credit to get a car.