From today’s Columbus Dispatch: 

 ”Our economy cannot afford to give up jobs like this industry provides when there was ample room to compromise to keep the industry going,” said Daniel Navin, the chamber’s{Chamber of Commerce} assistant vice president of tax and economic policy.

  “This bill, in my estimation, neither does anything positive for the consumer and certainly, by acclimation, does a great deal of harm to the paydaylending industry,” Sen. Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, told his colleagues.

 ”You can blame it on Bill Harris. He’s the one who made the decision in the caucus not to work with us,” said W. Allan Jones, CEO of Tennessee-based Check into Cash, which operates 92 stores in Ohio. “I guess up here, you all just need one guy.”

“Anyone who believes that the Small Loan Act is our savior knows nothing about finance and even less about what our customers want,” said James Frauenberg II, senior vice president of Dublin-based CheckSmart, which operates 105 stores in Ohio.

And while we’re at it, props to Jim Siegel at the Dispatch for providing the fairest, most balanced coverage of the Ohio payday lending fight over the last three weeks.  We’ve beaten up on a lot of Ohio reporters, so it’s only fair to praise the good ones. 

Check into Cash, a CFSA member company and one of the nation’s largest payday advance companies, has announced that they have closed their remaining 13 stores in Oregon. Their action comes one year after the Oregon legislature passed a law imposing a 36% APR cap on payday loans.

 

Allan Jones, Check into Cash CEO, explained that many stores closed when the legislature passed the 36% APR cap. No longer able to offer payday loans, they tried to meet customer needs by offering check cashing services and a new loan product.  “These new products were not popular with consumers, nor profitable for the company,” said Jones.

 

Also from the release:

 

“With the closing of our remaining stores, Oregon citizens will no longer have access to short-term credit and will be forced into costly products such as overdraft protection and bounced check fees.”

“We tried to work within the constraints of the law, but lost money each and every month we tried to operate there under the new rules. We have proven that it cannot be done.”

 “We are saddened that we have been forced to close our stores, putting our employees out of work and leaving our customers without a service they appreciated.”

“As we warned the legislators in Oregon, payday lending cannot be offered under a 36% rate cap. An annual percentage rate of 36% applied to a two-week loan amounts to less than a dime a day on a $100 two-week loan. That cut us from $15 to $1.38 for the two-week transaction. The legislators seem fixed on the APR of 391% as being bad, when in reality, it amounted to $15.”

 

Mr. Jones said it best when he stated, “The legislators will now have to answer to the tens of thousands of consumers whose credit choices are now limited because this type of micro-lending has been abolished, forcing consumers to more expensive options where no APR disclosure is required, such as overdrafts.”