Payday Rules Relax on Trump's Watch After Lobbying by Lenders

[DonViejo]

By ALAN RAPPEPORTFEB. 2, 2018

WASHINGTON — In mid-April, hundreds of members of the payday lending industry will head to Florida for their annual retreat featuring golf and networking at a plush resort just outside Miami. The resort just happens to be the Trump National Doral Golf Club.

It will cap a year in which the industry has gone from villain to victor, the result of a concentrated lobbying campaign that has culminated in the Trump administration’s loosening regulatory grip on payday lenders and a far friendlier approach by the industry’s nemesis, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Gone is Richard Cordray, the consumer bureau’s director and so-called bad cop, who levied fines and brought lawsuits to crack down on usurious business practices by an industry that offers short-term, high-interest loans that critics say trap vulnerable consumers in a feedback loop of debt. In his place is Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director and a former South Carolina congressman, who was chosen by President Trump to assume temporary control of the bureau and has emerged as something of a white knight for the payday lending industry.

“I think now we’re in a period that is relatively passive,” said Dennis Shaul, the chief executive of the Community Financial Services Association of America, the primary lobbying group for payday lenders. “I think it is advisable for us to largely draw a curtain on the past and try to go forward.”

Two weeks ago, Mr. Mulvaney put the brakes on a contentious rule, ushered in by Mr. Cordray, that was set to impose tight restrictions on short-term payday loans. He ended a case that the bureau initiated last year against a group of payday lenders in Kansas accused of charging interest rates of nearly 1,000 percent. Last week, Mr. Mulvaney scrapped an investigation into the marketing and lending practices of World Acceptance Corporation, a lender based in South Carolina that donated $4,500 to Mr. Mulvaney’s previous congressional campaigns through its political action committee.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/us/politics/payday-lenders-lobbying-regulations.html?emc=edit_th_180203&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57435284

[Eliot Rosewater]

1. Trump and his group want to help rich people extract every last dollar from the middle class and

poor.

We might deserve this though if we keep voting for them to do it to us.