In the New York Times Magazine: Lending Club

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A LOAN?
As Americans rethink the debt idea, peer-to-peer lending attracts interest

Debt, credit, lending — these are financial matters, to be evaluated empirically and mathematically. But that’s not all they are, especially lately. Value judgments about both personal and corporate borrowing and lending abound in this time of tight credit: who deserves to borrow and on what terms, who abused the idea of debt and why. As Margaret Atwood observes in “Payback,” her fascinating book about the meaning of debt: “Like air, it’s all around us, but we never think about it unless something goes wrong with the supply.”

The debt supply was abundant back in 2005, when Renaud Laplanche dreamed up Lending Club, now one of the best known of a batch of companies that have added Web-enabled “peer to peer” lending to the ways that individuals can borrow money….

Read the column in the May 17, 2009, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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