Tagged with Loan Sharks

Payday loans, TV and Class

loan sharkWhen was the last time that you saw someone take out a payday loan on a television programme? When did you last see a show in which someone in full time work was struggling to pay the bills? I feel there is a discrepancy between the portrayal of poverty on our televisions and that which is experienced in Britain today.

The Office of Fair Trading believes as much as £1.8 billion a year is lent in the UK by payday lenders and the Public Accounts Committee state that two million Britons currently use payday loans. Ofcom reported that in 2008, 17,000 payday loan advertisement spots were shown on television and this increased to 243,000 in 2011 and 397,000 by 2012. These resulted in 12 million impacts from adult views in 2008,  4.2 billion by 2011 and 7.5 billion impacts by 2012, with each adult watching on average 152 television payday loan adverts in 2012. Continue reading →

Payday loans: not a black and white issue (in reply to Chris Dillow)

Nothing excites me more than a myth busting exercise on payday lending – it certainly beats what we read in the papers about it – and this is exactly what Chris Dillow has done today. However I have one or two comments I would like to make about it.

Chris sets up three issues on the matter of payday lending contrasting “statists” on the one hand and “libertarians” on the other. Matter 1 is a non-starter. No one arguing against payday lending today argues between occasional high cost credit and no electricity. Instead, we argue that, in order for bills to be paid, why should the worst off pay the most for their credit? There is a statist v libertarian angle here, but also a third way in the form of statist v libertarian v responsible banking. I’ll explain.
Continue reading →

End Loan Sharking Now

As many of us pack our flexible friends to jet off on holiday it’s worth noting that in April this year private debt owed by the British people stood at a sky high £1460bn – that’s a hell of a lot of plastic! Of course many of us these days have a credit card, loan or overdraft and nearly all of us will at some point in our lives experience being in debt in one form or another. In fact if used sensibly credit can be a good thing – it can help us through life to get a University education, own our own home or set up our own business. Continue reading →