Earlier this week, Mark Gimein wrote a great article on TheBigMoney.com detailing, statistically, how risky person-to-person lending really is. I’ve always known it to be peer to peer lending or social lending, but the article calls out the riskiness of Prosper.com, the first and one of the largest of the peer lending networks.
To look at the results of Prosper’s loan marketplace, though, is to see not a solution to the credit crisis, but a microcosm of it. Loans to unqualified borrowers; reliance on mathematical models that turn out to be a lot less useful than they seemed; failed hopes that high interest rates could make subprime loans profitable; sky high default rates—Prosper has it all. Prosper’s Web site advertises returns of 6 percent to 14 percent for lenders. But the reality is that the lenders who loaned $188 million through Prosper have not earned anything like these returns. On the contrary, the majority of them have lost money, as they’ve watched their loans go bad at shockingly high rates.
The takeaway from the article isn’t that you should avoid Prosper, it’s that you proabbly …
Additional comments powered by BackType