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March 2, 2010

Profiting From Recession, Payday Lenders Spend Big To Fight Regulation

From the Huffington Post Investigative Fund:
The influential $42 billion-a-year payday lending industry, thriving from a surge in emergency loans to people struggling through the recession, is pouring record sums into lobbying, campaign contributions, and public relations – and getting results.
As the Senate prepares to take up financial reform, lobbyists are working [...]

March 1, 2010

Payday lenders giving advances on unemployment checks

By Robert Faturechi in today’s LA Times:
Critics say the high fees that come with the loans send the jobless into a cycle of debt. The industry sees it as a service for people in need.
The payday loan industry has found a new and lucrative source of business: the unemployed.
Payday lenders, which typically provide workers with [...]

February 22, 2010

Math doesn’t work for AZ payday loan industry

By Paul Davenport, Associated Press, in the Arizona Capitol Times:
The math isn’t adding up for Arizona’s payday loan industry.
The industry that provides small short-term loans is fighting in the Legislature to keep itself alive beyond a June 30 termination date that was included in the authorization law enacted 10 years ago.
Almost a month [...]

February 16, 2010

Mesa officials: Payday lenders need to scram

In the East Valley Trib:

Mesa wants one of its most visible industries to vanish in one fell swoop.
Despite payday lenders’ efforts to stay alive in the state, Mesa is pushing for its 83 payday loan stores to go away as of July 1 and take away their neon signs, flashing lights and [...]

February 9, 2010

Wall Street’s Race to the Bottom

By Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law Professor, in The Wall Street Journal:
Jamie Dimon is wrong. We shouldn’t expect a crisis ‘every five to seven years.’
Banking is based on trust. The banks get our paychecks and hold our savings; they know where we spend our money and they keep it private. If we [...]

January 30, 2010

H2161 locks in 391% interest for payday lenders

By Barry Aarons, in the Arizona Capitol Times:
As Robert Merry notes in his book “A Country of Vast Designs,” President Andrew Jackson wrote in an 1832 veto letter, “In the full enjoyment of … the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws [...]

January 28, 2010