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I'm not sure about the laws in your locality (in the UK you have to have a licence from the UK Office of Fair Trading to offer consumer credit), but I would gen

I'm not sure about the laws in your locality (in the UK you have to have a licence from the UK Office of Fair Trading to offer consumer credit), but I would generally support banning anyone other than payday loan companies from selling very high interest loans - high interest loans from utility companies and landlords strikes me as an obscenity. > What tends to happen is not that people go to the Mafia (traditionally they come to you!) The mob definitely loans money at high-interest: http://archive.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2009/03/15/mafia_loan_sharks_making_a_killing/ http://archive.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2009/03... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loan_shark#Post-criminalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loan_shark#Post-criminalizatio...

pjc50 8y ago
(also in the UK) > high interest loans from utility companies and landlords strikes me as an obscenity. My point is usually that this is a lot cheaper, since these don't usually charge interest at the payday rates. Utility companies have barriers to cutting you off. But ultimately people who have negative cashflow week-to-week are going to get in trouble. Limiting how much debt they can get in causes them to hit the buffers earlier, but less hard. (Incidentally, this is yet another major problem with "universal credit": paying it on a 6 week delay is designed to force people to use payday lenders!)