There are SO many excellent points made in this article on The Hayride that it makes little sense to do anything more than quote a few statements and provide a direct link:
And as RedState has noted, those people have been joined by Google. The internet giant, as it turned out, made a $1.5 billion investment into LendingClub, the peer-to-peer loan site, back in 2013 and has been on board with the assault on payday lending ever since. Payday lenders are not allowed to advertise with any of Google’s products or platforms, which is both (1) somewhat understandable given that they’re now competitors with Google to an extent, and (2) also the kind of creepy monopolistic practice which argues strongly for someone coming along and treating Google as a trust needing to be broken up like Standard Oil and Ma Bell. But we digress.
The long and short of this is during the Obama administration, some of the key funders of the Democrat Party – most notably a man named Herb Sandler, who together with his wife Marion essentially broke Wachovia Bank by dumping $15 billion in bad subprime paper on them before the housing crisis hit and who skated away from that mess with enough money to bankroll something called the Center for Responsible Lending – declared war on the payday loan industry around 2014.
And Forbes noted another nonsensical provision tucked into the 1,690 pages of the CFPB rule…
- Exemptions made for alternatives to payday lenders, including credit unions and community banks: If a lender derives less than 10% of its revenue from payday loans, it is exempt from some of the most onerous rules. This particular restriction is odd. Why is the hated payday lending product acceptable, so long as the institution making the loan only generates 9.99% of its revenue from such activities? Are high rates and frequent rollovers acceptable when coming from a bank? Or is there a presumption that payday lenders are evil while bankers are not?
This whole attack on an industry providing a service people obviously find valuable is beyond obnoxious. On its face it’s literally insane – who are the Center for Responsible Lending and the Louisiana Budget Project to tell people who they can and can’t borrow from? And if they do win the day, does that somehow mean people won’t find a way to do short-term borrowing? Of course not, which is why this is so pernicious – once that hole in the market is made, not accounting for the Cosa Nostra or local dope dealer entering into the less-salutary side of the business Google will be there to fill it, if the government in the person of the Post Office or some other failing agency is not. You’d either have a private or public monopoly on short-term lending instead of a competitive marketplace like you have now.
Given how well the government performed via Fannie and Freddie in bringing on the housing collapse, we know how well it would work taking over the payday loan industry. As for Google, given their Big Brother-style presence in your life as is do you really want one of their tentacles to emerge as a monopoly in short-term lending? Think about that – who’s creepier than Google or the government when it comes to your private information, particularly your financial information in the event you should have the kind of money problems necessitating a payday loan? You OK with that?
Questions? Help? Getting started lending money to the masses? Jer@PaydayLoanUniversity.com
