Huffington Post: “Prestige Predators: Private Equity Cashes In On Payday Lending”

An article from Huffington Post, “Prestige Predators: Private Equity Cashes In On Payday Lending” features our new report Private Equity Piles into Payday and Other Subprime Consumer Lending, put together in collaboration with Americans for Financial Reform and the Center for Responsible Lending.

From the article:

Payday lenders are more than a scourge of low-income communities. To illustrious financiers, they are also tacky and cheap. It is not so much that high finance disapproves of exploitation. But important capitalists move among other important capitalists. It doesn’t take much ingenuity to squeeze money from a working family desperate to meet an emergency expense.

So it is a telling sign of just how dysfunctional the American economy has become that some of the nation’s biggest private equity firms are now heavily invested in the payday loan business and its slightly more respectable cousin, subprime installment lending. A new report from Americans for Financial Reform and the Private Equity Stakeholder Project details dozens of such arrangements involving some of the biggest names on Wall Street and the scuzziest operations on Main Street.