A trade association representing the payday-lending industry declared<br />that these proposed rules, which would require lenders to either determine a borrower’s ability to repay a loan or set a limit of no more than three two-week loans in a row, would put thousands of lenders out of business.<br />It also ordered Mastercard and a partner to jointly pay $13 million in fines for “breakdowns<br />that left tens of thousands of economically vulnerable RushCard users unable to access their own money.”<br />Don’t expect President Trump to boast about any of these good deeds, which were all undertaken by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.<br />The bureau has also proposed restrictions on debt collectors<br />and payday lenders, who can sometimes legally charge interest rates exceeding what would be 400 percent annually for the two-week loans they provide to the working poor.<br />The Bureau of Resistance -<br />Three days after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, the United States government fined a couple of Citigroup subsidiaries<br />$28.8 million for giving the runaround to tens of thousands of borrowers who were trying to avoid foreclosure on their homes.<br />In early February, a group of business leaders visited Trump at the White House, where the president promised to roll back<br />many of the regulations imposed after 2008, when the financial industry’s recklessness nearly sank the world economy.<br />These might include regulations on debt collectors, payday lenders and all those brand-name financial institutions<br />that keep unhappy customers out of court through “mandatory arbitration” clauses buried in consumer contracts, voiding the option of filing lawsuits.
