A group of nine South Dakota-based payday lenders — doing business under at least 17 different names, but all sharing a common senior executive — has agreed to stop garnishing wages from customers with delinquent accounts, at least until there is some sort of conclusion to the Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against them. [More]
Stephen Colbert Supports Payday Lending, So You Probably Should Too
By April 17, 2009
Chicago Democrat Luis Gutierrez introduced a bill last month that supposedly reforms out of control payday lending, where interest rates can exceed 300%, but actually gives payday lenders the freedom to charge annual interest rates that can exceed, um, 300%. It doesn’t sound like much of a reform, and in fact Gutierrez has been heavily funded by the payday lending lobby. But luckily for you and me, Stephen Colbert explains why this is all a good thing.
So What's Replacing Boarded-Up Payday Lenders? Credit Unions!
By July 27, 2008
Consumers in Washington D.C. have apparently flocked to credit unions since the district outlawed payday lending last year. Payday lenders whined that lending without 300% APRs was utterly unaffordable, but credit unions are proving that it’s possible to make long-term, low-dollar loans with interest rates as low as 16%.
Study Says Payday Lenders More Prevalent In Areas Of High Christian Conservative Power
By February 15, 2008
A law professor and associate professor of geography set out to create the most comprehensive map of U.S. payday lenders to date. What they found, to their surprise, was “a surprising relationship between populations of Christian conservatives and the proliferation of payday lenders.” And it’s not a side effect of a poor population that happens to be Christian, according to the authors: “Our research showed that the correlation between payday lenders and the political power of conservative Christians was stronger than the correlation between payday lenders and the proportion of a population living below the poverty line.”
