Yes it was easy you even go to foreign country and taking credit and new phone or even car no questions asked much.
Was easy times money everywhere and not much skills required to get money just needed to make sure you can go to usa canada or uk specially uk was phaved with gold.
You know the answer, the inflation is killing lenders and the borrowers are also making it hard to lend money because of defaulters. Most countries today even the ones you mentioned were lenient with giving things on credit, you can get it no matter what but today, things have change, the economy is not smiling, the way inflations kills loans is hard, you may receive 5% interest and loss everything to inflation, so it's like you were never into the business.
The real effect and problem is the borrowers, the way they ask for information when you want to take loan looks like you are about to steal money from them but it's not there fault actually, it's the past experience they have that has make them to be over protective. If they don't adjust to the way people play with their loan business, there will not be available lenders that are going to give loan to people.
That was one of the biggest reasons why 2008 happened, for example. The banks realised that they could give mortgages to basically everyone, and if they default, then they would just put it up with other thousands of mortgages and sell that instead, and keep on doing this. In fact, they would put very secure mortgages with hundreds of bad ones, and then when it defaults, the house would be seized, and if that doesn't work, then we would end up with people who would be buying thousands of them, under the disguise called a CDO.
This was the reason: giving loans to everyone without checking anything further. There were multiple movies about that 2008 crisis but there is nothing further you need to know, the entire system crashed, because they gave mortgage loans to EVERYONE, and multiple as well, there were people with 5-6 houses, all because they were allowed to take out credit, and when they did, the market was so free to sell, because at the end, if you got that mortgage, and could buy, then someone else could too, and you bought it, revamped it, like painted and cleaned and made it better, and sold to another person who could easily get a mortgage, and this went on in cycles.
Some people did get rich if they were smart, but most lost their homes. On the day when banks finally crashed, they weren't capable of giving people loans, and they were not lenient on it anymore, so if you failed to pay, you got it seized. The only downside is that banks made a mistake and couldn't pay up, but the government bailed them out, so the government literally paid for those companies' mistakes, and yet the people? Regular citizens like you and me? We got our homes seized, and nobody helped us.
