Bad Paper Audiobook By Jake Halpern cover art

Bad Paper

Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld

Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for $0.00
Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime.

Bad Paper

By: Jake Halpern
Narrated by: Qarie Marshall
Try for $0.00

$0.00/mo. after 3 months. Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $14.18

Buy for $14.18

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

Jake Halpern introduces us to a former banking executive and a former armed robber who become partners and go in quest of "paper" - the uncollected debts that are sold off by banks for pennies on the dollar. As Halpern shows, the world of consumer debt collection is a wild and unregulated shadow land, where operators may misrepresent a debtor's situation, make illegal threats, and even lay claim to debts that are not theirs to collect in the first place. Halpern follows his collectors as they intimidate competitors with weapons, manage high-pressure call centers, and scheme new ways to benefit from American's debt-industrial complex. He also explores the history of collection agencies and reveals the human cost of a system that leaves hardworking Americans with little opportunity to retire their debts in a reasonable way.

©2014 Jake Halpern (P)2014 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Americas Crime Personal Finance True Crime United States Banking Wall Street
All stars
Most relevant  
The world of debt collection is so much more nuanced than I could have ever imagined. Just wow.

Incredible

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

By way of disclosure, my fiancé works in up-level aspects of this industry (currently at a large bank). He did not listen to this full book - he did take issues with some of it, and there is a lot of qualitative and anecdotal information. it can be a little overly salacious as it follows some of the characters in the story. In the book's defense (and against my fiancé), for better and worse, this book is probably 90% about what happens to resold debt, and what happens to consumer paper after it has been, frequently, re-parceled several times and changed multiple hands. It looks relatively little (but does briefly look) at the upstream issues of how and when debt is issued. It is an interesting look and it analyzes a segment of this industry that is not systematically scrutinized, but it needs to he considered alongside more staid analyses of American consumer debt. The narration is very good.

Revealing but fragmented

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Any additional comments?

The gritty, often shady, business of buying, selling, and collecting debt is told in this closeup view of some people in the industry. Strongly recommended!

Gripping Story

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

“I’d be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were efficient.”
― Jake Halpern, Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld

New New Journalism about the financial/debt markets is "So HOT right now".

I went into this book thinking it was going to be a bad copy of a Michael Lewis book. Anyway, a friend of mine recommended this highly. She also has a great book out about debt and the poor (How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy), so I overcame my reluctance and read 'Bad Paper'. IT stunned me. A lot of the basics I understood before, but Halpern was able to add detail and texture to the industry and the players. It reads like Dante's Inferno. First Circle (Banks?), Second Circle (Hedge Funds/Debt Buyers?), Third Circle (Fresh Debt Brokers?), Fourth Circle (Large, more reputable Debt Collectors?), Fifth Circle (Mom & Pop Debt Collectors?), 6th Circle (Older/Crap/Bad Paper Brokers?), 7th Circle (White Dope Peddlers?), 8th Circle (Thieves?), Lawyers (9th Circle). I guess it holds up.

Anyway, the book was tighter than I imagined it was going to be. It was measured, well-documented, and its methodology was documented and obvious. Jake Halpern wasn't venturing too far out with his recommendation or his observations. He played a very close narrative game, and it worked well of this book. Sometimes, you don't have to cook the story too much, the story is already there -- waiting to be eaten. Jake Halern did a good balance of being in the story and getting the hell out of the way.

So, next on my list (after I recover from the emotional toil of this book) is Mehrsa Baradaran's book (How the Other Half Banks) and Jayne Meyer's Dark Money.

An Examination of Bad Debts; its Buyers & Sellers

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Absolutely disgusting with the blatant overuse of racist epithets towards people of color!Could have been much better without theN word every 5 minutes.

Racist much?

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.