Tag: Predatory Lending

Hard Questions on Data Privacy

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By Karen Petrou

On February 13, bipartisan Senate Banking leadership asked for views on how best to craft a new consumer-data privacy and security framework.  Reflecting 2017’s Equifax debacle, the inquiry seems rooted in the credit-reporting framework.  Essential though it is, data-integrity fixes for the credit bureaus aren’t anywhere near sufficient protection now that consumer financial data are increasingly clutched in the hands of Facebook, Amazon, Google, and an array of lightly- or un-regulated technology-based consumer-finance providers.  As we have demonstrated, sustainable, sound, and fair consumer credit is critical to economic equality.  Continue reading “Hard Questions on Data Privacy” →

Profits, Purpose, and Payday Lending

~ Karen Petrou ~ 2 Comments

By Karen Shaw Petrou

On May 23, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued a bulletin allowing national banks into the short-term, small dollar lending often stigmatized as payday lending.  The policy shift is intended to spur regulated banks into a business prone to predatory practice, thus giving vulnerable borrowers a better way to tide them over short-term financial hardships.  Will banks start making short-term, small-dollar loans now that they have the OCC’s blessing?  Not if they can’t find a way to make money. 

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What a Post-Office Bank Can and Can’t Do for Economic Equality

~ Karen Petrou ~ 3 Comments

By Karen Shaw Petrou

Yes, I know – getting the post office into finance when you despair of getting your own mail, not the neighbor’s, is a stretch.  But the economics of small-dollar banking under the post-crisis monetary and regulatory framework force a hard choice:  create an equality-focused utility for otherwise-unbankable customers or consign them to the only financial sector that profits from them:  predatory companies.  Maybe someday fintech will figure out a way to handle huge volumes of small transactions, but some day is far away and un- and under-banked customers are losing income and wealth every day they cannot obtain affordable, sustainable financial services. Continue reading “What a Post-Office Bank Can and Can’t Do for Economic Equality” →

Paternalism, Payday Lending, and the Post Office

~ Karen Petrou ~ 3 Comments

By Karen Shaw Petrou

It is a truth known to all who seek consumer protection from predatory lending that payday lending is a scourge.  However, it is also a truth among business analysts that financial institutions will not willingly go broke. Regulated companies will exit a business which cannot generate profit regardless of unmet demand.  It is also a truth among business analysts that unregulated companies then rise to meet this demand, often undeterred by the social-welfare scruples that underpin the consumer-protection rules.
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