The first thing you should know about a woman I know, who I’ll call Annie, is that she volunteers to sit at the hospital with people who are going to die alone, who have no family or friends to be with them during their last moments. “It’s obviously sad,” she told me, “but I feel like I have enough positive energy that I can share some.” And share she does: She cooks her coworkers’ favorite desserts for their birthday; she organizes anti-racism workshops and attends racial justice protests; she teaches ESL classes to recent immigrants. Annie is, in short, a very nice person. She works hard at being good, to be friendly and kind to everyone she meets.



She also, for a time, made a living selling credit cards with high interest rates to people who were barely making ends meet.

Annie and I worked together at Capital One for three years. For a few months, I was her boss. I oversaw the bank’s “secured card” product—a credit card marketed to people whose credit is so bad they can’t get a credit limit of $300 at a 27 percent interest rate without putting down a security deposit. Ironically, at Capital One, the more of a positive-energy type you were, the more likely it was that you’d work in the subprime division. There, people like Annie and myself reasoned, the choices you made could, hypothetically, make things easier for struggling families. We told ourselves that such families likely didn’t have any better lending options. And for poor, under-banked households, many lending options are far worse than Capital One.

The real question, of course, isn’t whether a credit card with a 27 percent interest rate and a $39 late fee is better than a payday loan. It’s whether Capital One’s marketing campaigns push people into debt who would have otherwise avoided it; whether it is actually in a person’s best interest, desperate though they may be, to borrow money at an exorbitant rate; and whether this enterprise is ethically defensible—in particular, for the decent, hard-working employees who toil every day to make Capital One’s mercenary strategy a reality. Because the ugly truth is that subprime credit is all about profiting from other people’s misery.

In 2012, the year I started my first Capital One internship, the company’s acquisition of HSBC’s credit card business went through, making it one of the largest subprime credit card issuers in the U.S. The decision to double down on those Americans struggling to get by has paid off handsomely.

