ALTERNATIVE FINANCIAL SERVICE PROVIDERS ASSOCIATION

             ALTERNATIVE FINANCIAL SERVICE PROVIDERS ASSOCIATION

NEWS: May 26, 2015

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Sen. Mike Crapo Again Calls for Ending Justice Department's Operation Choke Point
Comparing Operation Choke Point to Tom Cruise's "Minority Report," a film where police use "psychic technology" to arrest alleged murderers before they actually commit a crime, Sen. Mike Crapo today made another attempt to end the Justice Department's controversial program.
"To explain [Operation Choke Point], I want to remind everybody of a movie that came out in 2002. It's called 'Minority Report,'" Crapo, R-Idaho, said during a Senate Banking Committee hearing this morning.
"[T]he Department of Justice has engaged in a program where it has actually designated not companies, not individuals, but business types or industries that are entirely legal in the United States as 'high risk' industries that should be stopped from participating in our economy."
"In fact, [the program targets] entire industries in the United States not because they have committed any fraud ... not because they are going to commit any fraud, but because ... they are determined to be likely to be fraudulent in the future," Crapo added.   Read more...Daily Signal 


Legislation in Rhode Island to limit payday loans may be dead this year
PROVIDENCE, R.I. - As recently as 2012, payday loans were a hot-button issue on Smith Hill.
Rhode Island was the only New England state that allowed storefront lenders to charge triple-digit interest rates. The AARP and others turned out in droves to beg lawmakers to rein in the annualized interest-rate charges of up to 260 percent. And they came close.
Three years later, Rhode Island is still the only state in New England that allows such rates on payday loans, the advocacy group known as the Economic Progress Institute told lawmakers again this past week.
And if the turnout for Wednesday night's House Finance Committee hearing on a proposed 36-percent rate cap is any indication, the payday lending reform drive that nearly passed in 2012, is dead again this year, dampened by House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello's open skepticism about the need for reform.
As Mattiello said again Friday: "The case has not been made to me to terminate an industry in our state. The arguments against payday lending tend to be ideological in nature. No alternatives have been offered to serve the consumers that rely upon this type of lending. I believe the consumer that utilizes this service appreciates it and wants it to continue."   Read more...Providence Journal

 

Funds denied: 1 in 5 Americans underbanked or 'credit invisible'
Some 68 million American households struggle to access checking accounts and reliable financial services
Low-income workers across America have always faced obstacles in taking advantage of financial services that more affluent consumers take for granted, from checking and savings accounts to auto loans and credit cards.
But data released earlier this month show that a staggering 20 percent of Americans have nonexistent or thin credit history and thus can't access money.
A report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) said that some 45 million people lack a credit score with any of the major reporting agencies. Of those, some 26 million Americans are "credit invisible," with no credit events on file, and an additional 19 million don't have credit record because of low credit history. Individuals in these categories are disproportionately low-income, African-American and young.
For these millions of Americans, economic participation is more constrained than for the other 80 percent of the U.S. adult population.
"A limited credit story can create real barriers for consumers looking to access the credit that is often so essential to meaningful opportunity - to get an education, start a business or buy a house," said CFPB Director Richard Cordray, of those excluded from the credit system. "Further, some of the most economically vulnerable consumers are more likely to be credit invisible."  

Read more...ALJAZEERA America 


25 Best Cities For Jobs
Thinking about moving to a new city for a job? Turns out, all cities are not created equal for jobs.
That's why Glassdoor is revealing its newest report on the 25 Best Cities for Jobs. These 25 cities stand out for having the highest Glassdoor Job Score*, determined by weighting three factors equally: how easy it is to get a job (hiring opportunity), how affordable it is to live there (cost of living), and how satisfied employees are working there (job satisfaction).
As part of this report, we include each city's median pay for employees, median home value, job satisfaction rating, number of current job openings and population. Check out the results...GLASSDOOR


BANKS STRUGGLING FOR CITY'S BACKING
Surveys show Cleveland has one of the highest percentages of unbanked households in the U.S.
There's an unbanked problem in Cleveland.
According to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Washington D.C.-based nonprofit Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), the city has some of the highest percentages nationwide of residents who either don't belong to any bank at all (the unbanked) or people who may have some kind of bank account but still rely on nontraditional bank products, like payday lenders (the underbanked).
In 2009, the FDIC began tracking un/underbanked populations through a survey of households being administered every other year. Data released last year on 2013's survey reports that 7.7% and 20% of American households are unbanked and underbanked, respectively.
CFED's most recent analysis is on the FDIC's 2011 data; analysis of the most recent data is still ongoing. It reports that 25.5% of Cleveland households are unbanked, and 31% are underbanked - a notable increase from the 17%/25% spread from 2009.
Those numbers place Cleveland third in the country for large cities with unbanked populations, behind only Miami (28.4%) and Newark, N.J. (34%), according to CFED. Comparatively, Scottsdale, Ariz., and Fremont and Irvine, Calif., rank the best, with each having unbanked populations below 1%.  

Read more...Crain's Cleveland Business


Top 15 fastest-growing cities in the U.S.  Where's everyone going?
Texas or California; cities in the two states absolutely dominate the ranking of fastest-growing cities with populations of 50,000 or more. Texas and California alone take up half the top 50 fastest-growing cities, with 15 for Texas and 10 for California, according to numbers just released by the U.S. Census Bureau.
What's more: These aren't big cities. Unless you live near one of these places, you've probably never heard of most of them. Yet these towns have seen their populations grow as much as 8 percent in one year.
The largest of the these towns in the top 15 is Irvine, California, The city grew by 11,420 people over the past year to total 248,531. That's nearly a 5 percent growth rate.
The bulk of the growth in California centers around the San Francisco Bay Area, where the tech gold rush has created more jobs, more money and bigger towns surrounding the major cities of San Francisco and San Jose (which incidentally just joined the elite group of cities with more than a million people).
In Texas, the fastest-growing towns are spread out among the state's largest metro areas, including Houston, San Antonio, Dallas and Austin.
None of the cities on this list are growing unrelated to a major metropolitan area. Even the ones in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Florida are all far-flung suburbs of major cities. Typically these suburbs are fairly new, and many are consistently ranked on this list.
(Note: We're talking above about growth rates. As far as sheer numbers of people added, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago make up the top three, followed by Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas and San Jose. But adding people doesn't necessarily mean those cities are really growing much. New York's growth rate was just 0.6 percent -- while Chicago's was a flatlining 0 percent, meaning that the number of people it did add was so minuscule a proportion of the total population that it was statistically meaningless.)   Read the list on Yahoo HOMES 

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