Payday Pundit

This story is becoming all too common.  Credit card companies are looking at the numbers from Wall Street, the rising number of people without work and getting worried that people will begin to rely too heavily on the credit they’ve extended and be unable to pay it back.  This applies even to good customers, ones […]

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Terry Kibbe of the Consumers Rights League weighs in.    From her piece in today’s Los Angeles Times:
“The Center for Responsible Lending and other so-called consumer advocacy groups rely on shoddy research in stirring gender, racial and class sensitivities to make the case against payday loans, as they did during their successful crusades in Georgia and North Carolina […]

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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 […]

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A Los Angeles Times blogger agrees with former Sen. George McGovern that the government should stay out of the business of restricting credit.  Money quote:  “Government is almost as good at quashing economic activity in the hood as it as at complaining about the lack of opportunity in the inner city.”

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