It will be an interesting post mortem if they make it public.
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Unfortunately, they're huge, and I doubt the Swedish authorities will do more than give them a fine and a slap on the wrist.
Here in Finland, It's not uncommon to have no debt apart from the mortage on one's home.
So what? It's 0% interest. It's incredibly helpful to have easy-access financing to split purchases across a few months.
>even simple things like buying a book through a web site requires declining several offers for paying with credit.
This sounds so specific it seems like you're taking a bad experience with one website and pretending all websites are like this. Most e-commerce sites I've used in the past year offer Klarna or some similar service and all of them have been implemented as just another option in a set of radio buttons.
Debit card payments are not debt - they're effectively the same as a direct transfer from the user's bank account.
I'm very conflicted about Klarna - on the one hand they do present an easy and (usually) safe way to handle transactions with small retailers to whom I don't necessarily want to share my payment details.
But on the other hand, they use a variety of dark patterns to try to get you to pay: 1. on credit 2. by signing-up for their credit-card
One unfortunate part of their earlier history, was that when you promised to pay with Klarna on a website, and was told you'd receive the invoice, there was a (perceived?) tendency for that invoice to never be sent due to an 'oversight'. When this happens in Sweden, the buyer gets a reminder a few days after the due-date, with a pretty large extra amount to pay.
There were quite a few stories about this in the press at various times [0], and I know quite a few people from Klarna and would tease them about it - which they always strenuously denied - but then it happened to me.
In any case, finding out how this happened is going to be interesting.
[0] in Swedish: https://www.svd.se/mangder-av-klagomal-mot-klarnas-fakturor
DeepL translation: "Lots of complaints against Klarna invoices. Klarna, the high-profile IT company, is being criticised by a host of customers. Many say they receive invoices with reminder fees and collection demands directly, without having been reached by an original invoice. The Swedish Consumer Agency is critical of Klarna's invoicing methods for several reasons and is currently investigating whether the company is behaving legally."
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator
Debt is slavery and so on. Let's not get too hung up on the fact that I dislike it.
> Most e-commerce sites I've used in the past year offer Klarna or some similar service and all of them have been implemented as just another option in a set of radio buttons.
Radio buttons is fine. It's the defaults and "are you sure you don't want to pay with credit?" questions I'm bugged out about. I don't have an issue with them offering it as an option. I've seen it with multiple websites using Klarna for payment handling.
I don't know, it seems like a failure at adulting to have to do that for small to medium sized purchases. If you need the feature, you probably should not have it available. Maybe this is my German attitude about money - basically, only take on debt for investments, a notable example being housing.
I use them because consumer protections with other methods aren't as good here in the States. Paying with a credit card, if I have an issue with a vendor, after a good faith effort on my part to resolve the issue, I can just ask the credit card company to deal with it. (I don't abuse this, but I don't doubt there are people who do.)
There are better and worse credit card companies for this. American Express has great customer service but they aren't accepted in as many places.
Unfortunately, this often isn't the case of people who are worse off, not good at managing their finances, and often overwhelmed by bureaucracy.
They fall behind on payments, and then get taken to the cleaners on fees, deferred interest etc., often paying several times the actual price of the product. I've seen this happen (with different but similar services).
Less savvy people being sold stuff they can't afford on credit has been such a problem that some countries have made it illegal to extend credit to someone who can't afford it, which is obviously extremely hard to enforce.
This is hard to grasp for many here, because HN readers tend to be well above average intelligence. Try to think in terms of "imagine how dumb the average person is, and now realize half the people are dumber than that". Now add mental or physical health issues into the game.