Category Archives: Wall Street Journal

Second time around – Rupert Murdoch’s error and correction

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In 2012, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal MarketWatch website reported, inaccurately, “Increasingly, your score can help you land, or lose out on, a job, an apartment or utilities.”

Of course, as you can see (by using the link in that quote), Murdoch made an honorable correction.

But now, under the same author’s byline, the News Corporation brand gets it wrong again, saying (in the first two sentences, and in boldface, no less): “We’d all like to land lower-interest mortgages, higher-paying jobs and nicer apartments. And we know that getting and maintaining a good credit score is essential to attaining those goals.”

The writer’s social media handle is included.  Here is what happened next.

Wall Street Journal removed comments

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[continued from creditscoring.com.  Last email (to Rupert Murdoch):  “… what are you doing about my comments that you removed?”]

From: Blumenthal, Karen
Sent: Monday, December 03, 2012 1:41 PM
To: greg@creditscoring.com; Henderson, Julie ( Newscorp )
Subject: RE: credit score, Credit utilization, Wall Street Journal, 2012-12-01

Greg,

I appreciate the feedback.

I have written several times about credit scores and in some of those stories, i have gone into more detail about the “amounts owed” category. In fact, as I’m sure you know, all of the FICO categories have several factors in them.

In this case, however, the focus was on the traits of high scorers, not the broad components of the credit scores. I have only 800 words a column, sometimes less, and a lot of ground to cover, so I cannot cover every detail every time, as much as I would like to. My goal here was simply to underscore that credit use, or amounts owed, come into play in a more significant way than, say, credit history and that the 7% use number was rather surprising.

To answer your question about the use of available credit, one-third or 30% are common rules of thumb offered by those in the business as a guide for consumers who want to know where the broad cut-off lines are. Changing your credit use is one of the fastest and easiest ways to impact a credit score quickly–especially when compared with credit history or missed payments–and i think it’s important to share that with readers.

Thanks for taking the time to write.

best,

Karen

From: Greg Fisher [mailto:greg@creditscoring.com]
Sent: Monday, December 03, 2012 2:58 PM
To: Karen Blumenthal, columnist, Getting Going, Wall Street Journal, News Corporation
Subject: RE: credit score, Credit utilization, Wall Street Journal, 2012-12-01 II

It is a math error.

Since it is only part of the 30 percent “Amounts owed” category, then how can “Credit utilization” account for—as you claim—30 percent of the calculation?

The sum of the other items in the category does not equal zero.

—
Greg Fisher
The Credit Scoring Site
creditscoring.com
PO Box 342
Dayton, Ohio  45409-0342

Edit, December 14, 2012:  Fair Isaac invalidated the link from the words “Credit utilization” above by removing the page that was located at the internet address http://www.scoreinfo.org/FICO-Scores/Score-Ingredients.aspx. The same information about the so-called credit utilization is now at http://www.scoreinfo.org/FICO-Scores/Pages/Score-Ingredients.aspx.