Posts Tagged ‘payday loans’

Apparently the money changers are back in the temple.
In a paper to be published this spring in the Catholic University Law Review, professors Christopher Peterson and Steven Graves find a surprising correlation between the geographic density of payday lenders and the political clout of conservative Christians. The more conservative Christians a state has the more [...]

How much worse can things get?
According to a new article in the WSJ, those wonderful community financial services people, more commonly know as Payday lenders are increasingly targeting recipients of Social Security and other government benefits, including disability and veteran’s benefits.

But it isn’t just the Payday lenders who are involved in this abuse of our [...]

In what is hopefully the start of something, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) announced the selection of 30 banks to participate in a two-year pilot project to help identify best practices in affordable small-dollar loan programs that can be replicated by financial institutions.
“Our goal is to identify small-dollar loan programs that are profitable for [...]

Elizabeth Warren at Credit Slips (a great blog I just now learned of on credit and bankruptcy by six academics) has a great post touching on some of the payday loan research including the the Center for Responsible Lending (PDF link), the Center for Community Capital (PDF link) and the the bad numbers in the [...]

In all the back and forth on payday loans in the press and blogosphere, a study titled NC Consumers after Payday Lending by the Center for Community Capital at Univ. of North Carolina does seem to be getting as much play as it should. Though the Community Financial Services Association of America (CFSA), the trade [...]

Over at Consumer Rights Watch, Mark Ireland has stated two truths about Payday lending:
1. Payday lending is a business that simply keeps people in debt, rather than provide them with an emergency safety net, and
2. Only enforcement of a comprehensive interest rate cap at or around 36 percent for small loans will solve the debt [...]

Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger are heading up a great initiative to get people to open bank accounts rather than use check cashing centers etc. that charge what is often a hefty a fee to cash their paycheck. In a commentary in the WSJ, they point out that: the number of check cashers, payday lenders [...]

The smell of tax returns is in the air, and so is the stink of shysters. Tax season means tax preparers and others are pushing high-cost refund anticipation loans. H&R Block, the popular low-cost tax preparation service, pushes refund anticipation loans on its “Fast Money Options” page.
Nothing is free, and nobody will pass up an [...]

The headline says it all “ A low, low interest rate of 396 percent” According to this article at CNN a large number of people in foreclosure counseling in Ohio, land of many a payday lender) also have payday loans. If that isn’t a recipe for disaster, what is?
Of note also is that a Republican [...]

In a new staff study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Donald Morgan and Michael Strain take another look at whether payday loans are predatory or, in Morgan’s terms, welfare enhancing. This time around, Morgan takes a look at the “afermath” when Georgia and North Carolina banned payday lending.
(Dr. Morgan has commented on [...]