A trip to the underworld of debt collection, where bankers team up with ex-burglars and few rules apply

Bad Paper is a riveting exposé, a moving story of an unlikely friendship, and a gritty narrative of how scrappy entrepreneurs profit from our debts. 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 shadowland, 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. It is a realm of indelible individuals who possess a swagger and vocabulary that even David Mamet could not invent. 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. The result is a bravura work of storytelling that is also an important consciousness-raiser.

Laura Newland’s generation has worked the hardest to gain admission to elite colleges and paid the most to attend. But when Newland left her Alabama hometown and arrived at Duke University, she found a liberal arts campus unlike anything depicted in those glossy guidebooks. The hypercompetitive battle for internships begins freshman year, and the economic pressures–student loans, the daunting cost of graduate degrees, high unemployment–are relentless. This perfect storm, brewing on campuses across the country, has fueled a Wall Street recruiting machine that is winning over the best and the brightest. In no time, Newland was seduced.

From Newland’s turbulent four years comes a provocative story of the higher education industry; the tension between ambition and indebtedness, privilege and purpose; and one student’s journey to make sense of it all.