Payday Pundit

Economist Christopher Thornberg has provocative column on payday lending in the Los Angeles Times.  Great quote from the piece:

Despite high fees, people continue to use payday lenders with some frequency. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me eight or nine times, and clearly something else is up. It might be easy to accuse the firms of taking advantage of people and earning unfairly high profits, but if profits are so high, why hasn’t there been a mad rush by the very competitive banking industry to provide these services in underserved neighborhoods? Given my personal financial institution’s predilection for hidden fees and what would seem to be unfair charges for even simple services, I wouldn’t chalk it up to an ethics issue. 

He goes on to advocate competition as the best answer to payday lending.  That’s something the industry has said for years.  Competition drives prices down and serves consumers best.