trivia

Double-click on any word and see its definition from Cambridge Dictionaries Online.

Person
Muhammad Yunus,: an authentic hero, the founder and director of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh has been described as the person who has done "more than anyone in history to empower the poor." Read more

History
With the creation of methods to calculate interest and record transactions, along came debt. Debt was a powerful motivator in early times. More: The History of Credit and Debt by Steve Rhode

Film
Loan Shark (1952): directed by Seymour Friedman and starring George Raft and Dorothy Hart. Plot Summary: A vicious loan shark ring has been preying on factory workers. When several workers at a tire factory suffer violence at the hands of the loan sharkers, a union leader and the factory owner try to recruit ex-con Joe Gargan to infiltrate to the gang. Source IMDb:

Numbers
In Britain, a two-year pilot of a specialist police unit was set up in April 2002 to tackle the criminal gangs responsible for counterfeit card fraud. By January 2003 the Dedicated Cheque and Plastic Crime Unit (DCPCU) had busted several counterfeit plastic card 'factories' and recovered more than 3,000 counterfeit cards and compromised card numbers, resulting in estimated fraud loss savings of more than £5.5 million.These measures are already providing benefits. Although counterfeit card fraud losses were £148.5 million in 2002, this is a 7% fall from the 2001 figure of £160.4 million. Read more

Things
credit note: a piece of paper given by a shop when you return something you do not want, which allows you to buy other goods of the same value

letter of credit: a letter from a bank allowing the person who has it to take a particular amount of money from a bank in another country

credit account (US charge account): a formal agreement between a shop or other business and a customer, in which the customer can take goods and pay the shop or business for them at a later time
Cambridge Dictionaries Online

Song
Credit Card Baby by Wham!
See lyrics

Quotes
Modern man drives a mortgaged car over a bond-financed highway on credit-card gas. (Earl Wilson, US newspaper columnist)
Creditors have better memories than debtors. (Benjamin Franklin)

Wordplay
bad credit = debit card
The Loan Company = The ploy: con a man

Literature
Street Window by Carl Sandburg
The pawn-shop man knows hunger,
And how far hunger has eaten the heart
Of one who comes with an old keepsake.
Here are wedding rings and baby bracelets,
Scarf pins and shoe buckles, jeweled garters,
Old-fashioned knives with inlaid handles,
Watches of old gold and silver,
Old coins worn with finger-marks.
They tell stories.

Proverbs
Whoever drinks on credit gets drunk more quickly. (Armenian)
Nothing seems expensive on credit. (Czech)
Credit is better than money. (Gypsy)
Sweet tongues buy horses on credit. (Hawaiian)
Credit is better than wealth. (Iranian)
He who drinks on credit, gets drunk twice. (Serbian)
A pig bought on credit grunts all the year. (Spanish)
Don't be fooled by how clean the turban is, the soap was probably bought on credit. (Turkish)
Buying on credit is robbing next year's crop. (American)