“Intelligence and thoughtfulness”
April 6, 2009 | Consumer Federation of America, federal legislation, industry | Comments (0)That’s how Seeking Alpha, a financial blog, describes how the members of the House subcommittee approached the payday lending hearing last week:
Most importantly, we got to see the testimony and deserved grilling of Jean “Queen of Hearts” Fox, from the Consumer Federation of America. Despite having evidence and testimony that directly contradicted her rigid ideological position right there in the room, she rambled on insistently about irrelevant APR calculations, how the loans are bad for people, and why rates should be capped at a level so low as to effectively ban lenders. All this, while there was a real-life, flesh and blood Alice three seats away saying how glad she was that the product was there for her, and that she hopes it’ll be there if she needs it in the future! But The Queen of Hearts kept insisting “Off with their heads!” Fox thus made her case perfectly – that opponents like her are living in Wonderland, out of touch with reality.
To the committee’s credit, they drilled her on the most important issue: if you ban payday loans, where will people go for short-term credit? The Queen got slapped back on every ridiculous alternative, right down to obscure credit union programs that barely cover 1% of the country. To anyone who still doubts that payday loans have a place, watch her testimony. She represents you, and she made the industry’s case for them.
I think Seeking Alpha shows a lot of intelligence and thoughtfulness in this blog post.
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