ALTERNATIVE FINANCIAL SERVICE PROVIDERS ASSOCIATION

             ALTERNATIVE FINANCIAL SERVICE PROVIDERS ASSOCIATION

NEWS: August 26, 2015

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CFPB's Cordray has proof that everyone hates payday loans; oh wait, his 'proof' proves that HE hates payday loans, not everyone.
 
"CFPB's Inconvenient Truth Revealed By Complaints Database" by Dan Horowitz
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a federal agency designed to purposely avoid oversight from Congress, with much fanfare recently introduced a public database cataloging all of the complaints it has received from consumers.
 
"Consumer complaints are the CFPB's compass and play a central role in everything we do. They help us identify and prioritize problems for potential action," CFPB Director Richard Cordray said in a press release announcing the new public database.
 
The only problem? The database shows complaints about "payday lenders," which are currently in Cordray's cross hairs, composed less than one percent of all complaints, far outnumbered by mortgage (36 percent), debt collection (17 percent), credit reporting (15 percent) and other categories. Payday lending complaints were one of every 152 complaints the bureau received, 55 times less frequent than mortgage complaints.
 
Given the weight the CFPB's allies have placed on the complaints - "[Consumers] could be our eyes and ears, and we could focus our resources wherever their complaints led us" is how Sen. Elizabeth Warren described it - one would think that would make it tough for the agency to continue its regulatory blitzkrieg against the lenders.

By way of background, the CFPB recently released draft regulations that would regulate payday lenders almost entirely out of existence, for example by requiring underwriting standards similar to a home mortgage for small-value, short-term loans that are often needed in a pinch.

Alas, the CFPB does not appear to be prepared to listen to the people it says it is trying to help. As soon as the American Banker noticed the "hidden messages" in the data, a CFPB spokeswoman began furiously backpedaling. "Consumer complaints are just one way we learn about the issues consumers face in the financial marketplace," CFPB spokeswoman Moira Vahey told the financial trade newspaper. Not, you know, the "eyes and ears" of the agency that it will follow wherever it leads them. It turns out consumers are only the CFPB's "compass" when they point in the direction regulators already wanted to go.

Perhaps, as Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) warned, Washington bureaucrats just don't understand that many people in the real world see short-term loans as a crucial lifeline.

"So many of the people making the decisions do not ever need a payday loan and don't understand that you work out the percentage interest rate and isn't it terrible that you paid $50 to borrow $400? Well, not if it keeps the lights on in your house. Do you know what the fees are to get reconnected? People in public affairs don't know. People are in the political world always have the $400 to pay their light bill," Sherman told Credit Union Times.

"The people who complain the loudest about payday loans are regulators, politicians and advocates that are dead set against them," Donald Lampe, a partner at Morrison and Foerster, added to the Banker.

Notably, other types of loans, including consumer loans, student loans, and mortgages received many times more complaints than payday loans. Maybe the agency should obey its "eyes and ears" and quit the regulatory jihad against a service that's unpopular in Washington but apparently providing a legal and needed service to its customers - those whom the standard financial industry is restrained from serving by the very same CFPB.   TOWNHALL.COM
MicroBilt
Rent-A-Center to award $60,000 in college scholarships
Rent-A-Center to award 60 U.S. high school and undergraduate students $60,000 in Rent-A-Center scholarships for distinguishing themselves academically and through civic engagement.
Having distributed $610,000 in scholarships since its establishment in 2004, Rent-A-Center's Make A Difference scholarship provides 60 $1,000 awards annually to Rent-A-Center customers, their children, and the children of Rent-A-Center employees.
The scholarships come on the heels of a recent Gallup poll that found that college-funding worries are a top money concern for U.S. parents.
"Rent-A-Center has a long tradition of supporting education," said Kenneth Jones, Rent-A-Center's public affairs manager. "It's gratifying to give back to the communities we serve and help offset tuition costs."
Among other requirements, scholarship applicants must be pursuing their first undergraduate degree at an accredited two- or four-year college, university, vocational school or technical school in the United States or Puerto Rico.
A diverse group of students from across 12 states, this year's awardees have a variety of academic focuses including engineering, business and psychology.   Read in RTOHQ
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The Lord of Loans: How Cleveland payday-loan pioneer Allan Jones was propelled to fame and fortune
Of course Allan Jones was the first baby born at Bradley Memorial Hospital in Cleveland, Tennesssee, on New Year's Eve 1952. From the beginning, destiny seems to have picked him out of the crowd.
Jones grew up as a middle-class kid in Cleveland but has since built an empire of sorts in his hometown: a lord with a hilltop manor and an entrepreneur's golden touch. He's larger than life, in many ways more like the industrial giants of the 19th century than a small-town businessman who grew up during the Cold War.
Jones knows all this. He has a keen self-awareness about his place in the world. He doesn't take himself too seriously or try too hard to be an inconspicuous modern multimillionaire. He'll pause a conversation to "take a leak." He bought the largest stuffed alligator ever killed in Florida when his favorite team, the University of Tennessee Volunteers, beat its archrival, the University of Florida Gators, one year.
Allan Jones is a philanthropist, a wrestling fanatic, a sharp businessman and a risk-taker. He's also the godfather of payday lending and the savior of America's oldest suit maker. Some people love him and some people hate him. Some people want what he has and despise him for having it. It all goes with being one of the richest people in Tennessee.
He's been called a robber baron by political pundits because his payday loan and car dealership franchises - Check Into Cash, Buy Here Pay Here, U.S. Money Shops - often depend on a low-income or financially struggling clientele, making short-term, high-interest loans that are capable of dragging the poor deeper into debt.  
Jones is considered by many to be a 1 percenter who made his fortune off the 99 percent. In 2005, BusinessTN magazine estimated his net worth at about $500 million, putting him among Tennessee's Top 20 most wealthy people at the time. A profile published the Huffington Post a few years later pegged his companies' after-tax profits at $20 million a year.
He's been skewered in national media outlets, called "odious" and "repellent," not to mention greedy and racist. He's been lampooned for the extravagant life he lives while his customers scrape by, paycheck to paycheck. But Jones lives outside the lines, and outside the neat boxes his critics and fans try to put him in. As his critics assail him, Jones turns around and gives millions to the University of Tennessee and his alma mater Cleveland High School for athletics, to Cleveland's Lee University for a new building, to improvement projects in his hometown.   Read entire story at TIMES FREE PRESS
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