著者

小島 庸平

出版者

政治経済学・経済史学会

雑誌

歴史と経済 (ISSN:13479660)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.61, no.3, pp.26-37, 2019-04-30 (Released:2021-04-30)

参考文献数

25

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This paper investigates how and why consumer-financing firms became highly developed during the post-war era in Japan. Although previous studies have emphasized the inadequacy of consumer finance regulation, this paper focuses on the strategy of lenders and the characteristics of borrowers from the 1960s to the 1980s.It is said that the number of “amateur usurers” increased among white-collar workers during the Great Depression. Even in the 1950s, there was still room for ‘amateur usury’ businesses, some of which were founded in the new public housing complexes of the time. The biggest benefit of “housing-complex finance” was that it saved the cost of credit checks. Because public housing complexes strictly investigated the incomes and assets of their applicants before allowing them to become residents, moneylenders in the housing complexes could substitute those inquiries for the usual credit checks.Other consumer financing firms founded in the 1960s also saved the cost of credit checks by using information from the borrower’s place of employment. White-collar workers in listed firms were evaluated on the basis of their overall character and therefore faced a certain dilemma. While they had to be sociable to maintain their reputations as good colleagues or superiors, the wining and dining expenses imposed a burden on their family budgets. They had to borrow secretly in order to make ends meet, but fearful that they’d be found out, they were avoided to an extreme degree any chance of defaulting on their debt. This made them very advantageous for consumer financing firms. During the rapid growth period, lenders used information about workplaces and residences as their standards for evaluating creditworthiness.After the 1973 oil crisis, however, there was a drastic change in how people used the money they borrowed from consumer financing firms. Unlike the 1960s, when male workers were the main customers, many housewives struggling from he recession started to use consumer finance to cover deficits in the family budget. This meant a greater risk of default than before and a need for more sophisticated approaches to lending. Consumer-financing firms introduced new statistical methods for analyzing creditworthiness and shared information with each other regarding defaulters, effectively instituting black lists. The corporate effort to introduce these innovations was essential to the development of consumer finance in the post-war era.