Human Worth as Collateral

1. Northeastern law prof Rashmi Dyal-Chand has posted her paper, Human Worth as Collateral.  Here is the abstract:

Human worth has taken on a surprising new role: that of market asset. Specifically, lenders in radically different contexts are using their borrowers' human worth as collateral in loan transactions. The two examples of this new collateralization that I examine are credit card lending in the United States and microlending programs in the Third World. I conclude that the use of human worth in these two contexts is too similar to be coincidental. Rather, this new collateralization is a product of globalization. For those interested in the effect of law on globalization, this convergence in the market for credit teaches important lessons. In both the contexts I examine, the laws governing secured and unsecured lending fail to recognize human worth as collateral. For this reason, the new collateralization serves as a counter-example to the claimed centrality of the rule of law in economic development.

And here's an excerpt from the paper:

[L]enders in very different contexts have begun to collateralize human worth. I build my case on two examples. The first is the puzzlingly high level of unsecured lending to American consumers by means of the credit card, despite the ease of secured home equity lending. I conclude that this mystery is partly explained by credit card lenders' collateralization of human worth through the mechanism of credit reporting. The second example is the puzzlingly high level of unsecured lending to impoverished rural women in Bangladesh by means of the Grameen Bank's microlending program. I conclude that this mystery is also explained by the lender's collateralization of human worth, this time through the mechanism of peer lending.

I have not read the entire paper, but this line of inquiry seems to be rich with implications for Catholic legal theory.  For example, does bringing the language of human worth into the discourse provide a more robust -- and anthropologically authentic -- ground for criticizing predatory lending?