Credit Inquiry

  

You want a line of credit to purchase a full box-set of every episode of Sex and the City. Because Black Friday is approaching, it’s only $4.99 for the DVDs on Amazon. You think it’d be a good conversation starter on your bookcase (Hint: It won't be.)

Before you buy it, you apply to Amazon for $3,000 in credit so you can buy things and then pay Amazon interest for the right to a closed end loop card. They send an inquiry to credit agencies to check your debt history and your ability to pay off bills on time.

Amazon is filing what is called a credit inquiry. This inquiry will provide one of two types of inquiries. A hard inquiry is specifically used to determine if they should underwrite a loan to you. If Amazon approves, you can now buy all the useless junk you want, up to $3,000 at a time. This inquiry will remain on your credit report for at least 18 months.

The soft inquiry, however, is done as a way to market products. For example, you might go online and look for an auto loan on a website like LendingTree. At that point, a variety of companies will run soft inquiries and then market the lines of credit and APR they can offer.

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Finance allah shmoop what is the credit rating agency reform

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act of two thousand six otherwise known as crack are

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out out something like that All right yeah that's How

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the real pros said anyway this act was meant to

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improve the quality of company credit ratings like a blindfold

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and dartboard should not be involved in making up are

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you know coming up with corporate credit ratings Well the

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law was ironically enacted in the hope that we would

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avoid nightmares like the subprime mortgage crisis that almost brought

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down the finances of while the entire country in world

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And yes it worked in the same way that a

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scale works in an embarrassing episode of the biggest loser

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The idea was that the big three agencies moody's s

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and p and fitch were colluding with each other and

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raiding every security as a okay sort of the same

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way wall street cell site analysts were leaned upon in

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the nineties by bankers who paid them to rate every

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company of strong by so that the companies would favor

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the investment banks when doing lucrative secondary offerings and other

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personal wealth management services for the founders and senior executives

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Newly ridge from you know aipo booty The big three

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then produced a product that wasn't reflective of the real

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risks inherent in the marketplace Basically they had been labeling

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Yeah well the act made it much easier for smaller

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firms to compete for business by doing high quality research

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and not being afraid to give bad ratings tow bad

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money butchers will The credit rating agency reform act of

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o sixth gives both businesses and the government the tools

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they need to fight off the shady hucksters of the

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