Buy Here Pay Here Dealerships

The LA Times did a three-part series this fall on what they call "Buy Here Pay Here" car dealerships. (Here is Part One, Part Two, and Part Three). The name, which was new to me, comes from a common requirement that customers return to the lot to make their loan payments. The high-interest-rate loans are usually for aging, high-mileage vehicles to people with ragged credit. The idea of the "pay here" is to provide ample opportunity for dealers to keep track of the car's--and customer's--whereabouts and to increase the likelihood of repayment by customers.

One year ago (almost to the day), Credit Slips discussed the repossession rates for auto title loans. Unlike buy here/pay here, auto title loans are not to purchase a car but require a person to pledge their car's ownership if a loan is not paid back. Adam Levitin came up with an estimated rate of 14-18% for repossession on auto title loans but emphasized how difficult it was to get such data. Surprisingly to me, the LA Times managed to get the buy here/pay here industry to not just share--but to gloat--about how this business model works. The key data: 1)  About 1 in 4 buyers default. 2) The dealerships make an average profit of 38% on each sale, more than double the profit margin of conventional retail car chains.

Occupy Wall Street, "Fringe Banking" and Public Options

I happened to walk by Zuccoti Park in Manhattan yesterday, where the Occupy Wall Street protest is centered. I picked up a few pieces of protester literature. I can't say that I was in any way comprehensive in my collection. Some of the literature was just nuts, e.g., a flier blathering about admiralty law usurping the common law and the Trading with the Enemies Act. This flier could just as easily have been found at a Tea Party gathering. It gave new meaning to the term "fringe banking." 

But I also picked up a thoughtful and intelligent, for example a flier about public banking and the Bank of North Dakota (the only state-owned bank in the United States).  Hmmm.  That sounds like a public option for banking. If the financial system is broken, maybe it needs some better competition. It's not such a crazy idea. We actually already do that quite a bit in the mortgage market-FHA, VA, RHS, Ginnie Mae, and historically the FHLBs, HOLC and Fannie Mae (Susan Wachter and I have a forthcoming book chapter on this, to be posted to SSRN soon). We've even done it in straight banking--most people forget that we used to have a U.S. Post Office Bank. We have an FDIC that used to compete with private bank insurance funds (see the opening chapters of Kathleen Day's S&L Hell for a description of the private Maryland S&L insurance fund that failed). And we have federal (public) currency that used to compete with and has now supplanted private bank notes.  My point here is not to endorse public options or not, but merely to note that historically they were a response to failed private markets and should be part of the policy discussion. 

Minnesota Attorney General Sues 5 Internet Payday Lenders for Automatically Extending Loans

The five lenders, Flobridge Group LLC, Silver Leaf Management and Upfront Payday, all of Utah; and Integrity Advance and Sure Advance LLC,  were each sued separately for violating Minnesota’s small loan laws.  The total U.S. market for Internet payday loans is estimated at $10.8 billion. These suits allege various violations, including automatic extensions of the loans and rolling the loans over by paying off an old loan with proceeds from a new one, as well as a failure to be licensed in the state.   The reporter who wrote this story  tried to call one lender and got a  voicemail system that kept looping back through the list of options after pressing "0" for "all other inquires." One of the options included pressing 3 "if you would like to extend your loan for another two weeks." A customer-service representative at Sure Advance LLC of Delaware asked for an inquiry to be sent to an email address. No response had arrived by late Tuesday.

Phone calls to one borrower, Diane Briseno's, home in Maplewood came from India, the Minnesota attorney general's office discovered. Her caller ID showed the call was from the State of Minnesota. Briseno's son, 20, had started applying for a loan online but never completed the form. Regardless, he had left enough information that the phone calls started almost immediately. When Briseno called back to a toll-free number, she was told her son had taken out a $700 loan and needed to pay $6,000 immediately.

Is it That Hard to Find a Good Payday Loan? One Woman Paid $900 in Undisclosed Fees

Following our prison visit in clinic this past week, we promised to report on a brand new (to us) scam, one involving a company that helps people “find” payday lenders. My student Bridget Mullins reports on it here.

One woman I saw at the prison had a question about a predatory lending scheme (if you can call it lending really) that I had never heard of before. She told me that she was looking for a payday loan so she went to a website that offered to find her a good payday loan. At some point she was asked to enter in her bank account info, but she didn’t read the fine print and she didn’t understand that they were actually charging her for this “service.” She never got a payday loan from this company, and it ended up costing her $900 in overdraft fees at her bank.  We have no idea how much the finder charged or how many times they ran these unauthorized fees through, so we tried to find out what might've happened.

Call for Papers on Regulation in the Fringe Economy

Jim Hawkins, Jean Braucher and I, put together a symposuim proposal on frindge banking products, and we were very fortunate to have Washington and Lee School of Law (home of the illustrous Professor Margaret Howard) accept our proposal. As a result, the law school is now making the follwing call for papers. 

The symposium Regulation in the Fringe Economy will be the most significant attempt to date by legal scholars to address the vexing legal and social issues created by lenders on the fringes of the economy who offer payday, auto title, for-profit college, and refund anticipation loans. A complete list of confirmed participants and their paper topics is available at the conference website: http://law.wlu.edu/fringe.

RALs - Will They Become Extinct?

Refund appreciation loans, or RALs, are among the priciest loan transactions out there.  Customers pay a fee (frequently 40% to 700% if expressed as an APR) to get their tax refund early.  The fees can be much higher.  I saw one where a consumer was owed a $4,000 tax refund, and paid $1,000 of that to a RAL provider, in order to receive the remaining $3,000 two weeks earlier than the customer otherwise would have.  In some parts of the country, for example in Indian Country, RALs seem like the only option.  This year I also saw a very well known tax preparers advertise FREE tax return preparation, only to find out they were actually providing high-fee RALs.  Not so free…..

But the RAL gravy train may be almost over.  The FDIC just ordered one of the last underwriters of the products to stop backing the controversial loans. The FDIC told Kentucky-based Republic Bank & Trust Co. that the loans are unsafe and unsound now that the IRS no longer offers banks its debt indicator, a tool loan providers used to determine whether a taxpayer had outstanding tax liabilities that could be garnished from a tax refund.

Hot Pursuit of Customers: The Real Reason More People are Turning to Payday Loans

As one who studies the advertising and marketing plans of payday and title loan companies, I was interested in two Wall Street Journal articles published this week on the topic of payday loans, one claiming that Dodd-Frank has pushed many consumers into the hands of payday lenders, and another describing how hard payday lenders are working to steal customers from banks. Since many payday loan customers do not fully understand the terms of the loans, it isn’t that hard to steal customers from banks.  Payday loans, often at least ten times more expensive than credit cards, are easier to get. The lenders are far friendlier to customers and have more locations and business hours.  Plus, have you seen the advertising? It makes it sound easy and even fun to take out a 500% loan.  Payday loan industry experts now claim that their toughest business challenge going forward is not collecting on bad loans but finding enough new customers to keep the hundreds of thousands of stores afloat. Payday loan volume dropped $38.5 billion in 2009, or 24% since 2007, in part because of state regulation. Industry has successfully dodged regulation in some state, mostly by claiming that customers desperately need these loans for emergencies. The truth of this statement seems critical to the survival of this industry, but let’s look at the industry’s advertising and the real uses of these loans.

Empirical Caution: A Lesson from Auto Title Loans

A few weeks ago there was some nice discussion about Jim Hawkin's article on fringe banking.  Natalie questioned whether Jim's assumptions about payday lending correspond with empirical reality. Similarly, it's worth pointing out that the data Jim relies on regarding auto title lending aren't what he or even his source thought they represented.  

I make this observation not to ding Jim's paper, but to raise a really troubling problem for all academics: how to deal with data from other scholars' empirical work?  

Fringe Lending and Consumer Welfare

Like Katie Porter, I found Professor Jim Hawkins' paper on fringe lending valuable for challenging some of the premises underlying calls for stricter regulation of fringe lending products like payday loans.  In my view, there are empirically testable criteria for regulation of fringe credit, which I hope to elaborate in a forthcoming paper.  Unfortunately, Professor Hawkins ultimately does not offer either a normative consumer welfare framework for credit regulation, or a truly empirical examination of the welfare impacts of fringe lending.  Instead, he relies on product descriptions that reflect industry marketing more than the experienced reality of working class borrowers who use them, and uses a very limited implicit definition of consumer harm to restrict the possible justifications for market intervention.

Hawkins' Fringe Banking Premise is that Payday and Title Loans are Short-term: If Only it Were True

Although I disagree with the starting point of the paper Katie wrote about yesterday, Fringe Banking by Professor Jim Hawkins, and thus disagree with most of Professor Hawkins’ conclusions, I have great respect for him and am grateful that his paper is part of the national discourse on this topic. I deal with very poor people regularly and know some have no place else to go besides payday or title lenders when they need cash. Thus, I try to keep an open mind that on some level products like payday loans could serve some utility in the world, if they were truly used sparingly and for emergencies only. And if there were no rollovers and people could not use 10 or 12 of them at a time. In other words, if they worked the way Professor Hawkins says they do.

Jim’s paper gets a valuable idea out there, but the facts about how these products are really used, and how they are marketed, explain why these loan products create more problems than they solve. My own curbside data of payday use (read the long version or the short version) suggest that Professor Hawkins’ starting point, that these loans are designed to be short term and thus to keep people out of a cycle of debt, is out of synch with the reality of either borrowing habits or lender business plans. Still, his idea does start a conversation, and in this field the two sides do not talk. Period. The product designs he speaks of, if actually followed in practice, would make this type of lending much less abusive. I might even like these products.

Fringe Banking and Financial Distress: Argument and Critique

Today at The Conglomerate Blog, there is an online workshop of former Credit Slips guestblogger Jim Hawkins' paper, Regulating at the Fringe: Reexamining the Relationship between Fringe Banking and Financial Distress. Jim shared some of his thoughts on what he claims is the "dubious" relationship between fringe banking and financial distress in some of his Credit Slips posts.

I found Jim's paper to be provocative and I've posted a critique of his approach at The Comglomerate as one of their invited commenters. I think Jim's definition of financial distress as too many dollars of debt is unduly narrow and that it is only by using that definition can be claim to debunk the relationship between fringe banking and financial distress--primarily by arguing that because these are small dollar loans they can't really be much of a problem. I also think Jim tends to overstate the extent to which the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection was justified by concern about financial distress. I think its primary focus is on correcting malfunctions in markets caused by misinformation or deception. Jim himself seems open to intervention in fringe banking on that basis, as he concludes his paper by exploring rationales other than financial distress might support regulation. Check out The Conglomerate blog to join the conversation about this topic and to see the thoughts of other invited commentators: David Zaring, Larry Garvin, and Todd Zwyicki.

Local Currencies

One moment that everyone seems to remember from The Office television show is the creation of Schrute Bucks, a motivational tool created by Dwight Schrute in his few moments of power as office manager. Any worker who accumulated 1,000 Schrute Bucks was entitled to five extra minutes of lunch break.

In the most recent issue of American Banker, Sara Lepro has a fascinating article on the growth of local currencies. Hardly worthless Schrute bucks, these currencies generally allow local residents to purchase them at a discount and then redeem them for full face value at local merchants. The idea is that local currencies promote local commerce, but Lepro points out their use has been growing in today's climate of mistrust against large financial institutions. The article will interest many Credit Slips visitors.