Thursday 7 February 2008

Pic of the day: "The freedom loan."

Love letters from the bank

I have two letters on my breakfast table. One is from some unknown credit institution, its only defining trait the word "frihetslånet" ("the freedom loan") printed on the front in red and blue on white.

Usually I throw away unadressed advertisements ("paper spam"), and doubly so when it doesn't even display a sender. However, I kept this for the delightful irony. Regular readers will know that I consider borrowing and sinning roughly equal, only in different domains. Each of them increases your experienced freedom now, at the price of less freedom later.

That doesn't mean I haven't actually borrowed money, although in later years mostly very temporarily, for a month or two. The exception was after the botched move, where I temporarily rented three places, fixing up one and paying a deposit on another. I did borrow some money from my bank then. And that's where the other letter comes in.

I opened the letter from my bank, thinking it a bank statement or some information about changed interest rates or some such. But it was a cheerful message that my credit limit had been raised. Well, I have already mentioned how they started sending me letters once a month for a while after I had paid back all of the loan. These letters were polite and informative, showing me how I could transfer money from the loan account to my everyday account. (Clearly I must have forgotten how since I wasn't borrowing in good times such as these.) Eventually they gave up, until now. Since I didn't want to borrow a little, perhaps I want to borrow more?

I assume they don't do this randomly, but that this approach has been proven to work on humans, since they spend money on it. That's a rather disturbing thought.