Canadian vs American credit
 

I was reading the "ask the loan officer" thread, and it got me thinking of the differences between American and Canadian credit.

My brother relatively recently went down to the USA to get an MBA. While down there, he found getting credit to be a pain in the ass, dispite a non-trivial credit and employment history in Canada.

I've also heard, anicdotatally, that in Canada "no credit is good credit", at least compared to the USA.

Does anyone know much about the difference between the American and the Canadian credit systems?

as far as American banks are concerned his credit in Canada is worthless.

We had the same problem when moving to Singapore, even though our banks Citibank, Chase, Bank of America all were located there, but they couldn't use the American credit history. First 6 months was using American credit cards and paying extra for "exchange rates" and then having work history applied for credit.