As the CFPB educates itself on military lending, it will come to understand that payday loans are NOT part of the problem:

Holly Petraeus, head of the Office of Servicemember Affairs in the Treasury Department’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has been traveling to military posts throughout the country and leading dialogues with troops and their families since January.

Petraeus and Elizabeth Warren, the treasury secretary’s special advisor for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, are gathering feedback they hope will help them when the new offices officially stand up July 21.

“A significant part of what we’re here to do is be a voice for military families and better understand the financial issues facing military personnel,” Warren said to an audience of about 70 troops and spouses. She added that she and Petraeus want “to make sure that military families have adequate access to financial education, and that there are adequate rules to protect military families.”

For the first time, Warren explained, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will have jurisdiction over lenders outside the traditional banking system, such as mortgage brokers, title loaners and check cashers, all of which have preyed on military communities, she said.

The former Ohio governor of course signed the state rate cap law.  From the story:

Ted Strickland seems to be generating more interest now that he’s out of office than he ever did as governor.

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The apparent concern is that accepting the job “would undercut Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor and consumer advocate who is currently a special adviser to the president charged with setting up the bureau,” The Journal says. She remains “a hugely popular figure among many Democrats and anathema to many Republicans,” the newspaper reports. (Presumably because the longtime critic of the financial industry actually would take seriously the job of regulating the financial industry.)

This is the second high-profile job for which Mr. Strickland is under consideration; his name also has come up as a possibility to chair the Democratic National Committee.

From the story:

President Obama may end up nominating Elizabeth Warren, a Wall Street critic championed by the left, as the chief of his new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau simply because no one else will take the job, according to the Wall Street Journal.

From the story:

About 60 complaints a month have been coming in to the Consumer Response Center, created by last year’s passage of the Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law, despite a note on the bureau’s website explaining the lack of a posted phone number or email address: “We can’t help yet because the Consumer Response Center is still being established.”

On July 21, the agency expects to be able to handle complaints of the credit-card variety. But its authority over other types of businesses, like pay-day loan-makers and purveyors of other nonbank products, won’t begin until it has a Senate-confirmed director in place. The White House has yet to name a nominee.

I’ll  say.  As they are “locked out” of the NFL right now and not collecting paychecks, they are certainly risky borrowers.  When they get their jobs back, they’ll qualify for payday advances.

More noise about Elizabeth Warren running for Senate in Massachusetts.  This isn’t going to happen.

You can’t get a payday loan–storefront or online–in the District of Columbia, but online gambling has just been approved.

An payday lending employee defends short-term credit in a New Hampshire newspaper.

Our New Hampshire stores – and other similar lenders – closed in 2009 after the Legislature passed regulations that made it impossible to operate. We helped tens of thousands of people overcome temporary financial shortfalls. And yet, among the many customers we served in the last half-dozen years, fewer than five of them filed complaints.

Interesting story on Bank of America’s need credit card fee:

Bank of America recently announced it would add a $59 “membership fee” to about 5 percent of its credit card accounts – using a mix of below-average FICO scores, “high credit utilization,” and poor payment history to decide who gets hit. While not illegal, this new fee breaks the intent of the CARD Act, which prevents credit card companies from increasing interest rates on existing balances until account holders are 60 days delinquent. Sure, this membership fee isn’t an interest rate increase, but it does arbitrarily hike the cost of credit card debt – which is exactly what the CARD Act is designed to prevent.

That’s the theme of this well-written and balanced story in the Courier News:

Well, if you’re in the neighborhood of McLean Boulevard and Big Timber Road, you’re in luck. Right at the corner is a gigantic PLS payday loan store that will lend you a few hundred bucks pretty easily — if you don’t mind an interest rate that Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office describes as “legalized loan sharking.”If PLS rejects you, a block down the street along McLean you’ll find a smaller payday loan store called Fast Cash In A Flash. Right next door to that you can trade your wedding ring for cash at Marelli’s Gold Exchange. And right across the street from those two is Elgin’s first and only pawn shop, Windy City Jewelry & Loan, where you can borrow anywhere from $50 to $63,000 by leaving that wedding ring, or maybe your high school clarinet, as collateral.