The Equifax disaster points to a much bigger problem
Just as a point of reference, in The Netherlands there is a central agency for recording the debt of people who mostly have fallen behind on payments. They only record debts that last longer than 3 months and of those delete all record of them after 5 years after being paid off. It is forbidden for this agency to record that you have a mortgage unless you fall behind on payments. Only negative information is stored on borrowers. If you pay your loan down on time nothing will be stored about you.<p>Also, it is forbidden for information in this agency to be used for identifying purposes by banks and the like. This means considerably less risk for me as a citizen, and it also means the information is less valuable for hackers. Mortgage interest rates are currently 1-2 points less in The Netherlands than they are in the USA, so there's no correlation I can see between America's vampire capitalism credit model and cheaper loans.