One cold morning Sam Black woke up with aching chest pain. Troubled by this new condition he went to see his Heart Doctor. Little did Sam know that hours later he would be lying on the operating table in route for a triple bypass surgery. The surgery went as planned, but it was not the last of them. Sam was sent to many specialists and rehabilitation centers, building a large bill, which they had no money to pay them with. He still pays several grand a year for the medication he is prescribed. Years after the operation Sam and his wife, Elsie, have narrowly escaped foreclose, however the most problematic debt they have is the hundreds of small term loans with interest rates in the triple digits. Elsie once said in an interview regarding the loans they had to take out, “You can’t really keep up with them” (Wright, 2011). Almost a decade later Sam has trouble speaking and has to carry around an oxygen tank. This is a normal couple that got caught in the continuous cycle of payday loans. Like other millions of Americans The Black family settled for shady overpriced short-term loans.
Those who struggle with poverty know that there are few opportunities for change and ways to get money. With a growing poverty threshold resulting in massive amounts of poor people living in inadequate living conditions, it makes it hard to obtain the essential life necessities. Many factors lead to this steadily growing tragedy. Many of those who live in poverty have few resources necessary for them to acquire money, resulting in the decision to get cash through payday loans, or quick cash. Despite the amount of money Payday Loan Companies lend to lower classes, they actually cause more harm to those who receive assistance than it actually helps them. ...
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Through the use of statistics, expert testimony, appeals to emotions, and a few comparisons, Scurlock tries to convey his message saying that because the lending industry’s main concern is maximizing profits, they have made it impossible to not have a credit card and avoid being taken advantage of. He accomplishes his goal of clearly relaying his argument to the audience with the high amount of credible support he provides.
In The Working Poor: Invisible in America, David K. Shipler tells the story of a handful of people he has interviewed and followed through their struggles with poverty over the course of six years. David Shipler is an accomplished writer and consultant on social issues. His knowledge, experience, and extensive field work is authoritative and trustworthy. Shipler describes a vicious cycle of low paying jobs, health issues, abuse, addiction, and other factors that all combine to create a mountain of adversity that is virtually impossible to overcome. The American dream and promise of prosperity through hard work fails to deliver to the 35 million people in America who make up the working poor. Since there is neither one problem nor one solution to poverty, Shipler connects all of the issues together to show how they escalate each other. Poor children are abused, drugs and gangs run rampant in the poor neighborhoods, low wage dead end jobs, immigrants are exploited, high interest loans and credit cards entice people in times of crisis and unhealthy diets and lack of health care cause a multitude of problems. The only way that we can begin to see positive change is through a community approach joining the poverty stricken individuals, community, businesses, and government to band together to make a commitment to improve all areas that need help.
Scott Gilmore's “Me, The Other Scott, And payday-loans” is an educational paper based on Gilmore's experience with financial fraud, the stresses of Payday Loans and the stigma behind people who use payday- loans. Payday-loans can be a lifesaver in a pinch, but could metaphorically kill you in the long run. Additionally, payday-loans target the financially unstable and people in less appealing urban areas because they assume they are the ones who need the loans. In my opinion, it is unfair to label someone using payday-loans as poor. Gilmore supports this point as he states, “these are respectable people with jobs facing unexpected car repair, or running too short to buy back to school supplies”. The reality is not
Credit cards: for some they are the paths to financial freedom, for others they are a necessity for daily purchases. During the recent economic crisis, many have sought out to find the cause. One common suspect is the credit card industry, which is comprised of more than six thousand card issuers (Clayton 209). This issue is debated in the two-part article “Should Congress Regulate Credit Card Rates and Fees?” “Yes” and “No.” Tamara Draut, Director of Economic Opportunity, Demos, argues yes, claiming the credit card companies’ ability to adjust terms and interest rates traps cardholders in everlasting debt. On the contrary, Kenneth J. Clayton, Managing Director of Card Policy for the American Bankers Association, argues no, stating that regulating credit card companies would hinder many people from obtaining credit and further damage the economy. Although both Draut and Clayton present strong evidence for some aspects of their arguments, both writers make assumptions which they fail to support and ignore the complexity of the issue, making their arguments overall unpersuasive.
The unethical aspect of this business practice is straightforward; that the individual brokers and loan companies knew beforehand that the borrowers would not be able to maintain the payments for these loans, and that the speculators would dangerously inflate the market. However they were more concerned with t...
Mortgage loans are a substantial form of revenue for the financial industry. Mortgage loans generate billions of dollars in the financial industry. It is no secret that companies have the ability to make a lot of money by offering a variety of mortgage loan products. The problem was not mortgage loans but that mortgage companies were using unethical behavior to get consumer mortgage loans approved. Unfortunately, the Countrywide Financial case was not an isolated case. Many top name mortgage companies have been guilty of unethical behavior. Just as the American housing market was starting to recover from its worst battering since the Great Depression, a new scandal, an epidemic of flawed or fraudulent mortgage documents, threatens to send not just the housing market but the entire economy back into a tailspin (Nation, 2010).
On top of providing credit to thousands of desperate consumers, the payday loan industry contributed heavily to the US economy in various regions. Thanks to the payday loan industry, over $10billion GDP was contributed to the economy, supporting 155,000 people with working jobs, while employing over 75,000 payday loan employees at 24,000 retail locations. In 2007 alone, the payday lending industry produced about $44 billion in credit to American consumers, generating $6.4 billion in labor impact and another whopping $2.6 billion in state, federal, and local taxes, amounting to approximately $37,700 produced per store employee. In this massive industry, companies weren’t considered industry players until they had over 51 branch locations, of which only three companies existed.
Credit card debt is one of this nation’s leading internal problems. When credit was first introduced, and up until around the late 1970’s, the standards for getting a credit card were very high. The bar got lowered and lowered to where, eventually, an 18 year-old college student with almost no income and nothing to base a credit score on previously could obtain a credit card (much like myself). The national credit card debt for families residing in the United States alone is in the trillions (Maxed Out). The average American family has around $9,000 in debt, and pays around $1,3000 a year on interest payments (Maxed Out). Many people have the concern today that these interest rates and fees are skyrocketing; and many do not understand why. Most of these people have to try to avoid harassing collecting agents from different agencies, which takes an emotional and psychological toll on them. While a lot of the newly recognized “risky” people (those with a doubted ability to make sufficient payments) are actually older people who have been customers of certain companies for decades, the credit card companies are actually consciously targeting a different, much more vulnerable group of people: college students. James Scurlock produced a documentary called Maxed Out on this growing problem, in which Senator Jack Reed of (Democrat) of Rhode Island emphasizes the targeting of college students in the Consumer Credit Hearings of 2005
This is no cause for widespread concern, referencing recent “growing pains” amidst online lenders, Lebda argued. He also suggested that we’re just witnessing an industry shift in financing, akin to that of the hotel and travel industry transformation of the early aughts. In line with this notion, Cramer said this is part of a larger movement toward convenience, consumer choice and (first) competitive pricing.
“New Data Confirm Troubling Student Loan Default Problems.” Project on Student Debt: Home. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Oct. 2013. .
Predatory lending usually occurs when financial institutions take unfair advantage of consumer’s financial needs by extending credit with terms that compensate them over and beyond the credit risk. Predatory lending comes in different forms, but always involve the consumer paying high interest rates and exorbitant fees. Some predatory lending practices include:
The implications of these findings are as follows. The works of these academics highlight the important point that there is higher volatility of capital charges for better quality credits (Goodhart & Taylor, 2004). This is because these credits face a steeper risk curve, as the movement within the ratings scale (from one rating to another) is much greater.
Synopsis: Coleen Colombo began employment with BNC the Sacramento California Concord branch in 2003. The Concord office was part of a regional group that subsidized $1.2 billion of loans a month. Coleen was hired as a senior underwriter for the Concord branch. Initially Coleen thrived in her position during one of her performance evaluations; she achieved a top rating of “exceed expectations.” It’s easy to say that Coleen loved her job with BNC, at is before the bottom fell out of the subprime lending market. Coleen and five of her colleagues, all women, said that they were highly compensated successful employees with the company.
Most poor people manage to mobilize resources to develop their enterprises and their dwellings slowly over time. Financial services could enable the poor to leverage their initiative, accelerating the process of building incomes, assets and economic security. However, conventional financial institutions seldom lend down-market to serve the needs of low-income families and women-headed households. They are very often denied access to credit for any purpose, making the discussion of the level of interest rate and other terms of finance irrelevant. Therefore, the fundamental problem is not so much of unaffordable terms of loan but rather of the lack of access to credit itself.
The first and arguably most common effect of poverty on society is its financial impact (Veritta, 2008). In many of the societies that experienced significantly high levels of poverty, debt was increasingly common, and especially debt accrued from moneylenders (Hatcher, 2016). For many individuals living in poverty, access to financial services such as banking is often stifled and rudimentary, making it difficult for such individuals to access self-improvement loans at standard and fair rates (Yoshikawa, Aber, & Beardslee, 2012). For these individuals, moneylenders are the best option available, which results in them paying exorbitant interest rates. The interconnection between poverty and finance, however, is cyclic in nature. The lack of finances or access to financial services causes poverty, which in turn causes an isolation of individuals from finances and financial services (Hickey & du Toit, 2013). This makes poverty a fairly complex problem to