Payday lenders are using a beating of late
. The news has not put the industry in a positive light from the caustic segment on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver urging potential payday loan customers to do “literally anything else” in a cash crunch to recent news that a New York District Attorney charged a local payday lender with usury.
Because of the customer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) poised to issue guidelines to rein in abusive payday lending, the timing couldn’t be better. What’s clear now – to anyone following these developments – is the fact that there is certainly a proper importance of strong, robust oversight for the payday financing industry.
These lenders have proliferated through aggressive marketing to financially vulnerable families, targeting members of the military, and profiling African American and Latino neighborhoods in the last 20 years. Through the 1990s, the amount of payday financing storefronts expanded from 200 to over 22,000 in metropolitan strip malls and armed forces bases across the nation. As John Oliver informs us, you can find presently more lenders that are payday America than McDonald’s restaurants or Starbucks cafes. These storefronts issue a combined, calculated $27 billion in direct lender payday loans in Massachusetts yearly loans.
Sadly, the “financial success” for the industry is apparently less due to customer satisfaction rather than a debt trap that captures borrowers in a period of perform loans. Continue reading “Drive to finish predatory payday lending gathers vapor”