Tagged with payday loans

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 →

Against legal loan sharking

Payday loans have become something of a sexy political topic. Stella Creasy has done a great deal of work to get it in the spotlight and Ed Miliband kicked off Labour’s local election campaign with a pledge to give councils the power to push payday lenders (and bookies) off the high street. Like the SWP, I’m always happy to clamber aboard a passing bandwagon and, to this end, I invited Carl Packman to come and speak to Stoke-on-Trent Central Labour Party’s meeting on Friday night. As readers may be aware, Carl has become the ‘go-to’ man for payday loan comment and recently had his Sky News debut cut short by the expiration of Margaret Thatcher. 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.
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Asking the right questions about the payday lending industry

It’s amazing what you can find on the internet sometimes.

Just looking around I found an American-based website offering people toolkits on how to create their own payday lending business. In big, bold capitals one of the headers reads:

“You can make a tremendous amount of money in the payday loan business and help people if you know what you are doing!!”

The last bit struck me, of course: help people if you know what you’re doing. Continue reading →