I was just posting on a thread about spam, which called to mind "instant approval credit card!!!" spamz.

And that made me think: WHOA! What happened to all the credit cards in Shadowrun? Is there no such thing? I can't recall reading a thing about credit in any SR book... Maybe that's responsible for increased poverty, since credit lets people build wealth (current debacle excluded of course).

Maybe there are credit accounts in Shadowrun, but we don't deal with them in the rules because shadowrunners don't want a paper trail? And the bookkeeping for interest rates would be a pain in the tuchus! Even so, it's hard to picture that in today's world, where unemployed broke college students can (or very recently could) get a fist full of credit cards, that things would be totally different in the latter part of the century... With the way things work now, I imagine that even the SINless could get credit accounts with exhorbitant interest rates and criminally high hidden fees.

Maybe that's why there are no rules for them -- as a practical matter, credit cards would do nothing except drain away the PC's money for little if any value added. Probably safer to use a more reputable source of credit, like Vinny the loan shark At least Vinny's penalties (leg breaking) are not going to be hidden in fine print!

Hmmm... it's something that most roleplaying games just don't get into (only exception I can think of is Battlelords). I'd say it's fair to assume that loans of all varieties are available at various terms. Obviously the credit card itself is obselete, so credit is just a kind of overdraft more or less. It would probably be automatically applied to your account, depending on how much money you tend to deposit and your credit history.

I suspect it's largely considered irrelevant because most runner's will be using shadier bank accounts, safety deposit boxes, a safe under their bed, or wherever else to hide their ill-gotten gains so that the tax-man doesn't come a knocking. I bet accounts held in places like the Carribean League will be a popular way to hide your wealth.

I mean when you actually look at it the book tells you very little about banking in general. There's no discussion of accounts, banking institutions, anything like that. Banks are some of the most powerful corporations in the world, but the only one that turns up in SR is the Z-O.

Certainly, if a player told me they wanted to take a loan from a shark, I'd hammer out some terms and let them go for it. If they wanted credit, I'd be interested in how they built up a credit history, and which institution had their SIN details, but I'd be fine with it otherwise.

Runner's Companion does have the In Debt negative quality, though I don't really like the way the rules work (so I start with 30 kay, and 30 extra freakin build points, and all I have to do is pay someone 3,000 a month, which is like a third of my lifestyle cost? Dude, sweet. Imma buy me some more skill ranks nao!). Basically I'd be happier just saying "If you want credit, take as much extra cash as you want, up to 50,000 nuyen. It doesn't cost anything, and doesn't count towards your starting cap, but you have to pay it back during play, with 20% interest per month).

i suspect that like anything related to money, players would be "gaming" any credit system to hell and back in an attempt to min/max the earning from it...

hell, it reminds me of when a exchange rate system was posted online (something that was pulled from SoNA, iirc) and someone made a program that would always earn money by jumping the sums back and forth...

on that note, d20 modern use(d) a "odd" system to kinda encompass all the intricacies of modern economics into a abstract system.

basically one had a wealth bonus and every item had a target number. if your bonus was higher then said number, you could buy it, no problem. if it was lower you could roll a d20 to see if you could find the cash, or you could take 10 or take 20 (increasing the time taken to shop around for said product on discount or similar). this however (or when buying something with a target number higher then 15), would reduce the bonus by some random amount.

It's not new to d20 Modern. Call of Cthulhu did it many years ago, with the Credit Rating skill.

could be, im not that familiar with CoC...

It can be assumed that revolving credit lines and payments thereof are an abstracted feature of Lifestyle.

Ohhh, lifestyle! Good point. So maybe my Low lifestyle doesn't cost me 5000 yen cash for goods, it really costs 4000 and I'm paying a grand of interest every month! And the reason I can't borrow money on a credit card and bump myself up to a medium lifestyle is that in order to even be able to take out the kind of credit I need, I'd need to have at least enough to afford the lifestyle in the bank already.

Also, the stuff that runners want (restricted foci, forbidden firearms, prostitutes) don't take credit cards. Probably >.> So the system is irrelevant for basically all on-camera transactions.

Though I wonder... What if a J wanted to pay you in stock?

d20 modern uses a wealth system that assumed most things are bought on credit.

The idea of paying runners in stock came up way back in Corporate Shadowfiles: perfectly acceptable to the business savvy runner.

I imagine some runners would struggle to get credit for the simple reason that they don't officially exist.

Technically a good fake SIN should allow you to buy a lot on credit. I mean, it's good enough to fool the cops, it's going to fool the "Fast Cash No Credit Check" guys.

But...but...that would be fraud! Which is wrong!

how about this, one charge someone joe wageslaves credit with a low sum, funneled to some off shore matrix store providing more questionable goods, and then have that store pay out certified cred ever so often for services rendered

the trick is for joe to be to embarrassed about the store to make a big fuzz over the odd charge of some low sum.

then one repeat it x amount of times to joe's all over the planet

sooner or later, the amount will be interestingly big...

The reason why I thought that there was no credit that existed in the game except for loan sharks of maybe the occasional organized crime syndicate.

2 matrix crashes where everyones credit history and SINs were wiped out. Fake SINs abound due to the fact that most everyones SINs have vanished. A system where no one has faith in the system does not work. I would say the only reason why people probably still bank is that I'm sure the computers they use as backups are a complete closed loop. There is probably only human data entry and that itself would also be monitored.

You would probably have to break into a heavily guarded bunker (human/magical/technological,) physically (hardware) break into the servers, and change the records without anyone noticing. That would be about the only way I would entrust my money in the banks. I would like to know that my SIN and my money won't vanish again. Credit on the other hand would be just too risky I would think. People won't loan out credit if they don't think they can make money off of you, and in a society where corporations already own you credit just doesn't seem like a good way to keep people down.

Which is why everyone uses electronic cash from electronic accounts that only exists due to the current configuration of a cloud of electrons?

I would think that after two crashes there is some form of backup that also exists outside of the matrix electron cloud. Otherwise it would be a cash system/hiding money in your socks and no one in their right mind would invest in electronic money. Maybe that is inserting my own belief into the system, but having something that unstable happen not once but twice, and within a handful of years would make anyone balk at using an even less secure system for keeping your money tracked.

Otherwise SR4 history is basically "So after those two terrible crashes we assure you that there are no more AIs that exist ever.... yeah ever. Trust us because we as the corporations have never done anything shady ever and been caught doing it. Oh yeah by the way we made the matrix and decided to make everything a completely hackable and open system. No one will ever take advantage of it either so trust us with all of your money. Just throw it in this hole that I have had my people dig. After you put your money in the hole for security purposes we then blow it all to hell and the money you put in the hole you will be safe. So sleep well with the knowledge that your money is completely safe and recoverable and not exploded at all."

*walks over to the wall* *wham* *wham* *wham*

to be honest i'm surprised that everything is still electronic. after the first crash i know i'd be wanting hard cash. after the second i would be seeing things as above.

I've made the point before that the Devs clearly have an unstated policy that all SR companies have a requirement to only hire "developmentally disabled" people to run their computer operations departments, said department budget being limited to only crayons and colored construction paper.

I mean, it's not like anything bad has has happened to computers in the last 50 years, right?

To understand the foolishness of your above statement, I'd like you to try a little experiment. Take a gold brick, a jeweler's scale, a printout of current gold prices, and a pocket knife to your local continence store. Use these items to purchase a soft drink.

If you are successful, so to your local big box store and repeat the experiment, this time purchasing some inexpensive electronics.

It doesn't matter if you trust the currency or not. All that matters is whether or not stores will accept more secure alternatives. A currency is only useful if you can buy stuff with it, after all.

It's at that point where you would probably go back to hard currency because no one has any faith in electronic currency. It's kind of how people let paper currency work. It's a piece of dead tree that gives a numerical value that can be traced through extremely complex flim flam. My comment is on how no one would trust the system anymore. Why the hell would corporations use the system either if it has been shown to be untrustworthy? It has been shown that the matrix is not a safe place to store personal data so what the corporations do is make sure everything is put on the matrix and that you can access it from anywhere in the world. What an amazing plan! I know when I plan to start my own personal business I am going to leave the doors of my business unlocked with a really big sign over it that says "Free stuff! Enter and take what ever you want because it's free!"

If there is no protection why would anyone use the open matrix. If there is no backups that are unable to be touched and are not extremely protected why would anyone invest in a system that has already created two depressions (in the sense that everyone lost their ID and tons of people fell through the cracks.) Hell even after the Deus scare I would think many people would even be afraid of touching the net.

For one thing, hacker costs are a cost of doing business. To protect against fraud today, banks and credit card companies buy insurance. They pass the cost of that insurance on to the consumer. No system will eliminate all the theft or fraud. And if you went to hard currency, you'd have to worry about people knocking you down and taking it away from you, arguably a much bigger worry in such a crappy dystopian world. Hackers probably steal identities and cred every single minute of every day, but there's so much circulating through the system that they're like mosquitos sucking out less blood than the system can spare. People get their money stolen and banks probably refund it automatically without even having to check with the cusomter, who will never even know they suffered from a hack. They do that today, even (although they still call you to confirm that it was fraud, being modern day dinosaurs without any semiautonamous knowbots to sort the data for fraud).

There was a comment by Peter how the second crash killed or injured more people than any single event before. Given that several billion people were killed by Vitas I have to wonder what the hell he was smoking, but it was a very significant event that had hugely bad effects on a whole lot of the world. It's not a minor event that your insurance company would have prevented you from noticing.

Finding that you can't actually buy food because a) your bank lost all their records and hence your money is GONE, b) you don't actually officially exist any more, and c) there isn't any food because the companies that ship and sell food had all their records destroyed and can't sell, purchase or ship food is going to be a significant emotional event.

I wasn't saying that insurance covered the crash, but rather that electronic currency is secure because the system is going to be designed taking the costs of hackers into account. The idea that a "hackable" matrix would somehow render e-cash unworkable is what I was arguing against. Just like today, people steal electronic money all the time, but because those costs are built in, electronic currency is no less secure than paper -- and probably more secure, because there's no computer system making sure that nobody steals your wallet out of your pocket.

Why would any samurai use a katana when Tokugawa's musket-wielding forces overwhelmed their traditionally armed opposition? Because the Shogun with kill you if you're caught with any sort of firearm.

A very large percentage of feudal policies are designed specifically to keep the peasants down, and the megacorp system is nothing more than neo-feudalism masquerading as anarcho-capitalism.

Megacorps are to finance what volcanoes are to mixed martial arts, if a volcano was sentient and decided to enter a mixed martial arts tournament. At first, Mount Vesuvius might seem like an easy opponent to defeat. It doesn't even try to move and it heavily telegraphs its single attack. But then you come to discover that it is too large too grapple, you can punch it all day and it won't even flinch, and its one highly telegraphed attack is an instant KO.

The big guys always come out on top no matter what happens, because they run the show. For that reason alone, they aren't concerned about a little potatoe famine in Ireland, which can easily be solved by eating babies. And the little guys who are out their selling their babies to chefs don't really have a choice in the matter. There is one system for them to use, take it or leave it.

Well, no, it's more than that. And less than that. It's both simpler and more complex too.

i suspect that the orbital bank retained the important info.

that is, the portfolios and the financial records of the AAA corps, and its owners and primary investors.

quick guess, the orbital only deals with the corp owned banks, most of the time.

then the corp owned banks deal with other banks again, and with each other for less "sensitive" transactions.

so the crash takes out one or two layers closest to the joe's of this world, but leave the big bank in the sky untouched, where it counts.

its what one get everywhere, if one could firmly seal of a nation running on religiously backed feudalism at the time.

hell, if the pope and the english king had not come to blows, europe may have had much the same thinking if the knights had convinced the pope to declare guns a heresy...

Whatever you say... Mr. Quayle!

But really, good post Hyzmarca, I just couldn't resist picking on the typo. If we think that corporations have too much power in today's system, just think about Shadowrun when they have their own territory and armies and are all much bigger and more powerful... The Crash may have wiped out lots of folks, but the corps had the dedicated human capital and sheer orneriness not to get destroyed, so they still rule the world.

That said, I wonder if the RL future world will be dominated by megacorporations. Shareholder investment requires confidence that management is looking out for the interests of the shareholders and not themselves. But with lavish compensation packages, bonuses paid out regardless of whether the company tanks, and absolutely no accountability in the system... That is clearly not the case. I mean, how many bank executives have been fired over crashing the economy? Zero? It's all the fault of the current crisis, nevermind the fact that these people were complicit in creating it... I have to think that things will need to change before corporations outstrip governments in terms of power. As long as people have more trust in their governments than in corporations, governments will be able to hammer corps back into line if they misbehave. So I suppose that Shadowrun will happen if there's some kind of massive government failure (a plague and two crashes?) which leaves nobody standing tall except the corps.

i suspect real life corporations will be much happier hiding behind the government.

buy some officials here and there, and let the government take the brunt of the blame.

As a matter of fact the Pope banned the crossbow in 1139. How did that work out?

Hideyoshi disarmed the non-buke, (with very draconian laws) in addition the limits of guns. It was much more far reaching. But the Buke wasn't really big on the whole gun thing ever, and matchlocks really kind of sucked for most purposes other then mass combat. The vast majority of Nobunaga's arquebus (or spear armed, for that matter) armed troops were not Buke.

Most investors today buy stock as short term investments. Very short term. Essentially they care about the company fundamentals about as much you'd care about the history of the red chip you are putting down on 37 at the roulette table.

You'll also notice that none of the political class, like the ones who took $100,000 bribes from mortgage companies (like Chris Dodd), or the people who assured the press that Fannie May and Freddie Mac were totally stable and any attempt at regulation was just an evil attempt to keep poor people from having house (Like Barney Frank) have been fired either.

Problem with that system was that firearms were inherently overpriced. Getting a vehicle (I'm talking a dodge neon) would make you bankrupt as well. It didn't make any sense, except you didn;t have to worry about food and clothing.

Back to the OP's comment:

I recall lines of credit being part of your lifestyle costs. For most mudane things it will work, however for gray and black market goods, certified credstick or comparable trade is the SPP (standard purchasing procedure). Mostly due to the fact that you don't want the electronic data trail.

Maybe I should read all the posts before I post what he said!!

And if you leave it the choices are:

1. Running the shadows
2. Running with a gang
3. Joining organized crime
4. Join a piliclub dedicated to marxism or other cause
5. Commit low level crime until you get caught and sent to a corp prison (and they are required to rehab you).

And the consequence of this is:
1. You are a figment to be ignored.
2. Your gun is your best friend.
3. No medical insurance.
4. You meet Mr Johnson alot to cover said medical and living expenses!
5. You have no regular income stream or official assets.
6. Therefore you have no official credit.

you tell him to go fark himself.

then you find another job.

Those guys aren't investors, they're called day traders. But there are certainly lots of large investors in it for the long term, like pension funds, charitable trusts, and suchnot. And investment firms spend thousands of man-hours poring over all company data to try and predict how companies will do in the future, and thus recommend to their clients whether to acquire, hold, or sell. And those people depend on managers who are looking to maximize their returns, not take crazy risks with other peoples' money and lose it all in one fell swoop. To be sure, smart analysts will tell you not to buy a badly run company with greedy managers who want to take your money away. But if all corporations are like that, then the public markets are surely fucked. I imagine that the current crisis will produce worthless regulations that don't protect shareholders and increase the cost of doing business, but restore "confidence," giving companies enough capital to meet the costs of complying with new laws, and starting the cycle over again. But this will also probably push many firms to re-privatize -- eventually regulations might become painful enough that most companies try to get out of the public market -- if that happens, then we will never see a future where corporations rule everything, because without public capital companies would never be able to grow large enough to rule the world.

That is supposed to be happening now, thanks to SOX. At least that is what the financial press says.

I think it's pretty clear that SOX has driven only some firms to privatize. The fact is, you just can't grow as big unless you have OPM (other peoples' money) to play with, and the way to get large quantities of OPM is to make public securities offerings. Until regulations make the cost of public offerings exceed the benefit, most big companies will stay public. Especially because the venture capital firms are going under thanks to participating in (and probably fueling) the risky investments that led to the current collapse.

Damn... I work a 22 hour shift and suddenly kzt posts about the outlawing of crossbows. Oh well. = )

The bigger question is corp script kind of like stock then? I mean it isn't exactly stock, but maybe it is kind of like stock. The biggest problem is that it is probably more traceable and I know many Shadowrunners don't like that.

Corp scrip isn't like stock. Stocks are securities, and securities rights are determined on a contractual basis. Someone who accepts currency does not enter a contract with the entity who issued the currency, they do not have a security. All they have is a piece of paper that, based on the law of the issuing entity (whether government or sovereign corporation) can be used to pay debts. Of course, on the streets, anything might become currency. People might use old UCAS or CAS dollars, even though they're not technically valid. Any kind of currency that the black market will accept, based on people generally agreeing to its value in the shadows, can become a useable currency, whether it's old dollars or corp scrip or oak leaves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossbow#Legal_issues

that ban may not have happened...

oh and: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanophile

I know it isn't like stock, but if that corp goes under your scrip is basically useless... kind of like if you invested in stock. It's the only similarity I can see, and I was just throwing out the "this is the closest thing SR has to stock."

Corp scrip is nothing like stock. Stock represents ownership of the company; scrip is essentially a gift-certificate or gift card - fiat currency that the corp promises to redeem in its stores but which doesn't have any legal value outside of the corporation. It is used by businesses to keep money in house. If you pay your employees in scrip then they can only buy from your stores, which, lacking competition, can overcharge them, thus saving you money by A) reducing your employees' actual wages and B) preventing your employees from leaking currency outside of the corporation. Some companies will exchange scrip for negotiable currency, but never at a 1:1 ratio. Scrip can also have an expiration date beyond which it will not be accepted, encouraging conspicuous consumption and impulse spending while discouraging saving. And, of course, all the expired unspent scrip is pure profit for the business that issued it. (Consider that in real life, US consumers lose $8,000,000,000 (yes, billion) annually to unredeemed gift cards).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip

Well actually the 30,000 in cash you get means you have a 45,000 nuyen loan with 10% interest... of course that's not that hard to pay off.

When you look up Japanophile you get the cover of 1st edition SR.

I know it's not stock I just said that.... although maybe you didn't see that.

Yah and then when Emergence comes out... and the AI takes over the orbital facility... the bank system has its third failure as everybody tries to redeem for cash.

That's talking about scrip IRL -- are you sure that corp scrip in Shadowrun is redeemable only within the corporation? Because corporations are sovereign. That would be like saying that Americans believe the Chinese yuan to be worthless because stores won't accept it here -- that's not really accurate, and American banks will exchange yuan for dollars... Because corp scrip is backed up by the most powerful entities in the world, I imagine that, at the very least, you could sell it for face value (or near face value) in nuyen. Though in the shadows it probably doesn't matter, you can probably spend corp scrip freely (though you always run the risk that any particular dealer doesn't like corp scrip, doesn't accept uncertified cred, etc, because there are no laws that can compel illegal vendors to accept one kind of money or another)

a corp may very well refuse to handle some other corps scrip.

didnt banks stop trading icelandic krona for a while as the value was going thru the floor?

UCAS and CAS dollars are both still the default currency in their respective nations (though the Nuyen is also accepted there).

Corp Scrip is just a currency, the same as any other. The way all currency works is someone says "This piece of paper/digital information represents a certain amount of value. I will back that value by showing that have something of that worth." So there have been gold backed currencies, and land backed currencies, and all of that jazz. Corp Scrip, therefore, has value as a currency because it is backed by the corp which issued it. This generally means that whilst Corp Scrip is not stock, it is backed by the issuing corp's stock (same as how the Pound Sterling isn't Sterling Silver, but it's backed by the value of the Sterling Silver that the government holds).

The main downside to Corp Scrip is that you generally can't spend it without also presenting an ID issued by the same corp that issued the scrip, to prove that you were issued that cash. It's also usually only accepted by the issuing corp (though theoretically it has value anywhere), but it can be exchanged like any currency.

Johnson's offering to pay in Corp Scrip usually offer about 10-20% more than in Nuyen, because they know you'll spend it on their products. It can be a pretty good deal if you happen to be eyeing up, say, the newest line of Ares SUVs, and your employer happens to be Ares.

Most of the above is from Corporate Download, which is very much worth reading if you can get your hands on it.

most of the words currencies today are fiat ones. basically, they are not backed by anything other then the sayso of the national banks that print them...

also, iirc hong kong today have tree banks that print their own money.

the way i see it, the nuyen is the lingua franka of the SR economic world, and thru it, the different corps dont have to honor each others scrip as they trade using nuyen.

if some wageslave wants to go to some outside source he could probably use some of his scrip to buy nuyen. but if done above a amount within some time, it may well make the HR department curious.

also, the nuyen value is pegged to the stock portfolios of the corps having representatives on the corp court, no? and managed by the vault in the sky?

oh, and didnt USA lack a central currency until the civil war? where the IOU's handed out to the soldiers as payment became a de-facto currency as they where used to buy food and drink wherever the soldiers ended up?

Ok..... who and what generates and regulates then? It has to come from somewhere, and more or less of it has to get put into the system. How is it mandated then?

The matrix has exploded twice. Even if you are using a system that will probably explode again there needs to be some form of regulation and digital trace that each electronic money transfer uses. It has to go back to a source so what source is it?

Each form of currency used today has something that is backing it. The US dollar is backed by the US and other countries back their currency, just like Ares backs its corp scrip. The only time the world does not recognize a currency is when it is rapidly falling into oblivion. Who or what backs and creates ?