The series “Fargo” and the book “Skuldsatt” describe our loans and those who collect them
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full screen Juno Temple plays Dot Lyon in the TV series “Fargo”, which in its fifth season dwells on debt. Photo: HBO Press
“The problem is that you think you’re rich because you’re better than I am,” says the debt-ridden cop Indira Olmstead in a scene in the latest season of the comical yet bloody crime drama “Fargo.” The series is loosely based on the Coen brothers’ classic film from 1996 and the seasons are independent from each other. All take place in Minnesota and are about the goddamn greed of ordinary people – but also about the honesty of ordinary people.
“Fargo’s” fifth season examines and dwells on debts, on the people who have them, the people who drive them and what separates them. Dot Lyon has managed to escape from a violent man, change her identity and build a new, happy life. No one knows who she is, she has done everything to stay hidden from her killer ex-husband who hired a madman to take her back by force. The ex-husband thinks Dot owes him that, since they are married.
Central to the series, both for Dot and the aforementioned Indira, is the billionaire and CEO of Redemption Services, the largest debt collection firm in the United States.
Redemption Services, it sounds more like a chance to be forgiven by God, than by a credit company.
But the one who is financially indebted knows that a debt can weigh as heavily on the heart as an original sin. I have become obsessed with the idea of becoming debt free. Or not even guilt-free, I have accepted that CSN sends flyers until I am lowered into the ground. What I want to be free of is a private loan I took out from my bank in the spring of 2020 when I was panicking and didn’t think things through very carefully.
It was late at night, I was feeling desperate and I took the loan from my phone. I would have the money to pay the tax, which I had not put aside in my individual company during the past year. I had lived up to almost every penny.
My calculus of happiness cannot be explained in any other way than that I am an involuntary entrepreneur, the result of a labor market measure invented before I could say anything about it and which I would rather have been without.
pullquote Can’t we agree that enough is enough? I don’t want to pay more
I took out the loan because the year before I had been cleared of a couple of remarks at the Kronofogden and I under no circumstances wanted to end up there again. A couple of minutes after I submitted my application it was approved and the problem was not solved, but it was postponed and I made a guess that the solution was there. A loan is always a guess about the future, according to Lena Pettersson which is now current with the book “Skuldsatt”. But a guess is no more than a chance, and a chance is as often bad as good.
The Swedes are one of the most indebted nations in Europe, writes Pettersson in a book that shows how unpaid loans are a brilliant business idea. In 2020, over 1.1 million people in Sweden were registered with debt collection companies. The number of over-indebted persons, who have been continuously with the Enforcement Officer for five years, is estimated to be 265,000 people.
That we are in debt over our ears is not a coincidence, but a result of political decisions and a credit market that has been without extensive regulation since the mid-1980s.
I’m in debt, you probably are too. And your partner and your boss.
Some loans are a little better than others, almost invisible, like my student loan. Your mortgage was almost invisible, if you have one, until the interest rates started to move away.
An unsecured loan, which I took out that night, is neither invisible nor good, above all because it is insanely expensive and gets more expensive as time goes on. But private loans, unsecured loans, are also bad because they are loans you take out when you are poor. In fact, the poor are offered more expensive loans than the rich because the poor prefer to suffer because they are.
Lena Pettersson describes how banks and credit companies drown us in, and sink us with, borrowed money. Every time we try to pay something online, we are encouraged to enter into a loan agreement, and nowadays the consumer is encouraged to borrow not only for large expenses, but for all his consumables. Loans that the credit companies hope we won’t be able to pay for a long time, that’s the business idea itself. The companies are making a profit as we try to catch up month after month. If it feels hopeless, it makes sense.
Immoral? Undoubtedly.
Despite this, it is the question of payment ethics that haunts decision-makers, those in power and authorities. The lending ethic, Pettersson points out, is never lifted by anyone. Liability in Sweden only applies to the borrower, not the lender. And the question of payment ethics is not just something fuzzy, abstract, but comes up all the time in, for example, political discussions or decisions about who gets debt settlement or not.
In the last episode of “Fargo”, when you think that everything is finally resolved and the ex-husband is imprisoned, the madman who would murder Dot Lyon seeks her out, to finally collect the debt: her life.
The debt collector must collect the debt, even though the person who lent it has disappeared. But Dot refuses to go with him. Why must debts be paid, she asks the killer as he sits on her couch.
“I understand that you have to keep what you promise. But people always say that debts must be paid. But what if you can’t? Isn’t it better, more humane, to say that debts should be forgiven?”
When at the end of January I paid another 2,000 kroner on that damn loan I took out on impulse almost four years ago, I calculated that I had soon paid the entire sum I borrowed. If you screw up the interest rate.
Can’t we agree that enough is enough? I don’t want to pay more. For me it’s so much money, for you none at all.
Please Nordea, let me go. I know it was stupid, to borrow on such bad terms. I made the wrong decision. Isn’t it every human’s right to make mistakes and be forgiven?
2024-02-06 02:28:55
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