CORE rips CRL over “KKK” slur

The Congress on Racial Equality issued a news release slamming the Center for Responsible Lending for comparing its critics to the “KKK.”   This name-calling is typical.  They don’t want to argue facts, so they smear their critics.    This is what we’ve come to expect from CRL. 
  http://www.expertclick.com/NewsReleaseWire/default.cfm?Action=ReleaseDetail&ID=20421

Center for Consumer Freedom: Keep payday loans in competitive market

The Center for Consumer Freedom has a great letter to the editor in today’s USA Today responding to a recent editorial on payday lending.
“USA TODAY’s editorial on payday loans invoked the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s (FDIC) stance in support of putting caps on these loans…But the FDIC’s own chairwoman authored a study in 2005 that painted [...]

NPR: Payday loans may benefit consumers

Kudos to North Carolina Public Radio journalist Janet Babin for this accurate, in-depth report on the payday lending industry in this piece from National Public Radio’s Marketplace program. The piece discusses new research that says payday loans can actually benefit consumers and that consumers in states without payday lending are driven to bounce checks or turn to other less desirable options. [...]

Keeping it real

One of the biggest problems with the payday advance debate is that too many reporters don’t do their homework and wind up getting their facts wrong.  Your Payday Pundit is pleased to see that there are still some newsies out there who take journalistic accuracy seriously and gives kudos to the Birmingham (AL) News for [...]

Tv ads give a voice to payday loan customers and employees

Commercials by the Community Financial Services Association feature REAL employees and REAL customers – the two populations whose opinions about payday lending tend to be ignored in the debate.  Unfortunatly, the voices of those who have actually used the product or worked in a store are overshadowed by the shouting of those who’ve never needed a payday loan or stepped foot in a [...]

EXCLUSIVE: Pennsylvania ‘Better Choice’ Program Hurts Consumers

Your Payday Pundit is working on a scoop that nobody in the media has yet picked up on involving the “Better Choice” program recently enacted in Pennsylvania. 
Payday advance lenders are all about free markets and competition because they ultimately bring better value to consumers.  But a close look at the Pennsylvania Better Choice program [...]

Payday lenders “target” everyone

A new study says that payday lenders locate in communities with large Christian conservative populations. This on the heels of  prior allegations that payday lenders locate in communities with high populations of minorities, women, immigrants, the elderly, the poor, the middle-class and now conservative Christians. A recent BusinessWeek article even said payday lenders are now targeting more affluent [...]

Air Force creates short-term loan program

Now that the payday loan industry has been effectively banned from loaning to the military, Air Force personnel will now rely on charity.   The Air Force Society is creating a “short-term loan product” that is essentially free (at least if you’re lucky enough to be int he Air Force.)  http://www.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/stories/2008/02/25/daily19.html

Wall Street Journal doesn’t do its homework

The February 12th front-page Wall Street Journal story by Ellen E. Schultz and Theo Francis, “Social Insecurity:  High-Interest Lenders Tap Elderly & Disabled” confuses payday lenders with other types of small loan services: primarily installment and catalog lenders. 
The article describes loan practices that are NOT conducted by payday lenders.
Major errors in the WSJ article:

The article [...]

Welcome to Payday Pundit!

Whether you are a customer, a policymaker, a reporter, a lender or even a critic of the industry, we hope you visit frequently. Updated multiple times a day, commentary on Payday Pundit will cover all topics associated with the short-term credit market: insider knowledge; new research; media coverage and corrections; legislative efforts; financial literacy and community [...]