Major Credit Bureaus

While many people would like to see as little institutional intervention in their daily lives as possible. There are some definite advantages to have huge homogeneous agencies look after your information. Big brother may be watching, but at least is watching everybody. And that keeps things fair.

This is especially true with major credit bureaus. Remember the Great Depression. You probably don’t, because you are not old enough to have been there. That’s probably for the best. One thing that most people learned back then was that having small independent agencies in charge of people’s money was not a good idea. There were no reliable records of people’s money. Therefore, some people got away with everything, and others got nothing.

Today, this is way less of a risk of this happening because we have three major credit bureaus in the United States. They are:

• Equifax
• Trans Union
• Experian

These institutions are nothing more than record keepers. They have no control over what you do with your credit, or whether you get credit or not. What they do is provide your credit information to other institutions so that they may make those decisions.

Besides the major credit bureaus, there are other credit bureaus in the United States, but they often deal with specific credit requests, not the smaller retail purchases that we do almost daily.

When you think about it, the major credit bureaus only function is to have massively powerful computers with huge databases that are able to process large amounts of data. And because of the credit problems of the past, today, major credit bureaus are watched like hawks by government institutions to make sure that everything is running smoothly.

It is also important to note that all of the major credit bureaus do not share credit information. That means that if you think that maybe your credit rating or credit report is wrong you can go to at least two others to verify. It’s kind of like going to a different doctor to get a second opinion.

It also means that when you try and get a loan, more than one institution will check your credit history. This will give you, and the place that is offering the loan, the ultimate assurance that everything is kosher.