The Wall Streeters head to Davos World Economic Forum.

An editorial in Mississippi is the latest to publish a false statistic from the CRL:

Mississippi and Wisconsin have the highest annual percentage rate – 574 percent – on payday loans, based on December 2008 statistics from the Center for Responsible Lending.

The conservative American Enterprise Institute  takes issue with Presidential Commission’s findings: 

Like Congress and the Obama administration, the Commission’s majority erred in assuming that it knew the causes of the financial crisis. Instead of pursuing a thorough study, the Commission’s majority used its extensive statutory investigative authority to seek only the facts that supported its initial assumptions–that the crisis was caused by “deregulation” or lax regulation, greed and recklessness on Wall Street, predatory lending in the mortgage market, unregulated derivatives, and a financial system addicted to excessive risk taking. The Commission did not seriously investigate any other cause and did not effectively connect the factors it investigated to the financial crisis. The majority’s report covers in detail many elements of the economy before the financial crisis that the authors did not like, but generally fails to show how practices that had gone on for many years suddenly caused a worldwide financial crisis. In the end, the majority’s report turned out to be a just-so story about the financial crisis, rather than a report on what caused the financial crisis.

Salon.com mentions high interested lending in a story about the morale of our troops.  If any lender is violating the law, making loans to our troops that are not in line with the rules imposed four years ago by the Talent Amendment, then they should be investigated and prosecuted.

This HuffPo columnist thinks government should speak in plain English and Elizabeth Warren is part of the solution.

Elisabeth Warren is giving an interview to Ron Howard?

A new non-profit bank has opened in New Haven, CT.  From the story: 

START christened its two branches Tuesday, at 299 Whalley and 258 Grand Ave. The event marked the culmination of seven years of work to create a “community development bank” in New Haven—locally owned and run, overseen by a not-for-profit corporation, dedicated to lending to small businesses and homebuyers within city limits and to guiding people in poorer neighborhoods away from predatory payday lenders.

A state Senate panel voted against killing short-term credit businesses.

The Senate panel voted 8 to 6 to kill the proposal from Sen. John S. Edwards, D-Roanoke, which would have capped the amount of interest that could be charged on open-end credit at 36 percent a year.

Virginians can take out short-term credit and as long as lenders provide a three-week grace period on loans they avoid tougher new state laws put in place to curb payday and car title lending. The Senate Commerce and Labor committee has already killed three bills — sponsored by Sens. Mamie Locke and John  Miller — that would put the same cap in place on payday loans and car title loans at 36 percent.

Two key House Republicans involved in supervising the CFPB are from Texas.  From the story:

Reps. Jeb Hensarling and Randy Neugebauer both have long held the belief the GSEs should be privatized. It’s estimated the two companies have cost the taxpayers roughly $134 billion since being placed into conservatorship in 2008.

On Monday, Neugebauer, who represents parts of the West Texas panhandle including Abilene and Lubbock, said the government should lower the maximum size of jumbo loans that the GSEs can purchase, according to multiple published reports.

Last week, Neugebauer, who’s chairman of the House financial services subcommittee on oversight and investigations, sent a letter to Elizabeth Warren seeking clarification on a few points.

If you do, are you siphoning money out of your local economy and feeding the city of Bentonville, Ark.? That argument gets used a lot for payday lenders, including from a city councilman in Lubbock, Texas, but it makes no sense.

Todd Klein, District 3 City Councilman said, “Responsible change at the state legislative level will not only help those people that are making these loans but quite frankly whenever that money is siphoned out of our community into these out of city or out of state companies in considerable numbers, that’s money that doesn’t circulate in our economy.  These people don’t get ahead and we also as a community lose out.”

If that’s the case pass an ordinance that says only Lubbock-based businesses can operate in Lubbock and see how that works.