The Liberty Institute just posted a podcast interview with Natasha Mayer, author of last week’s Daily Caller piece on Tribal Lending.  They take about ten minutes to get to it.

If you haven’t registered by now, you’re probably not going, so this will be my last post encouraging you to register for the conference, which you can do here.

The Huffington Post really seems concerned about congressional threats to the CFPB.  From Simon Johnson’s’ latest column:

In Washington, before lobbyists try hard to destroy something, they first spread a great deal of disinformation about it. Thus the “End Users’ Coalition” (a front for the derivatives dealers) promotes its lobbying points as fake research. And “fiscal conservatives” attempt to distract from the fact that our largest banks brought us to the brink of budget disaster — this is their preparation for demolishing all vestiges of financial reform.

Can they be mentioned in the same story?  Yes.  From the Salem (OR) News:

Tonight’s Best Documentary win for “Inside Job” serves as a reminder of the critical importance of financial reform even as implementation of reform is under attack by congressional Republicans seeking to cut off funding, policy experts at The Greenlining Institute said tonight.

Greenlining co-founder Robert Gnaizda is prominently featured in the documentary as one of the few whistle-blowers who saw the subprime meltdown coming and tried to sound a warning.

“The film shows how deregulation produced a massive housing bubble built on speculation, inflated appraisals, bogus bond ratings and outright fraud, and it ought to be required viewing for members of Congress,” said Chris Vaeth, The Greenlining Institute’s Washington, D.C.-based legislative director.

“It’s ironic that even as ‘Inside Job’ is being honored, some in Congress are working to squelch the very regulations that could stop the next meltdown by blocking the funding needed to implement them.”

Beginning Thursday morning, the Payday Pundit will be in Florida for the conference.  We’ll put up some posts from there.

She continues to make the rounds.

The Associated Press reports:

Perhaps you should set up a poll for your readers to vote on the popularity of CRL compared to some other organizations with suspect motives and tactics.

Just caught this quote in the story on the Chicagobreakingbusiness.com site:

“By and large, community banks and credit unions have followed a business model that’s very customer-friendly,” she said. “These are folks who have had to engage in pretty visible competition and put their prices upfront.”

But the small banks and credit unions have to compete with unlicensed lenders, such as check-cashers and payday lenders, as well as giant banks that don’t play by the same rules and competitive forces, she said. “What I see is the consumer agency ought to be natural allies with the community banks and the credit unions, because we want to push the other two kinds of providers of financial services much closer to the community bank model.”

Obviously storefront lenders are licensed as well as check cashers so to whom is she referring to?

A CRL “study” claims that payday lenders are less popular than liquor stores:

“Polls and elections from across the country have demonstrated over the years that the only folks who really like payday loans are payday lenders,” said Paul Leonard, director of the California office of the Center for Responsible Lending, which sponsored the poll.