A New Front in the War on Payday Lenders

‘Big Corporation helps government regulators crush poor people.’
This is a headline fit for a series on the current war against making loans to low-income borrowers – although we’ll never see it framed this way by The Washington Post or The New York Times.
But this is exactly what’s happened with payday loans as Google has joined government regulators in an effort to get rid of the payday loan industry and keep low-income working individuals from having access to cash lenders. After all, it seems evil capitalists in the payday lending industry are offering loans at higher interest rates – loans the poor would otherwise have no access to at all.
According to Zero Hedge, Google has been working around the clock to combat ‘fake news,’ a new category of information big media and established politicians have invented to attack news organizations that fail to spread the official narrative. As part of this war on ‘fake news,’ Google banned ‘predatory’ ads as well, disabling five million payday loan ads in the last months of 2016. This new policy of course helps both government regulators and established bankers who now are subject to less competition from small payday loan firms.
As someone who has used payday loans in my days of struggling with little income in Hollywood – and when no bank would help – I find it incredible that, in 2017, people don’t know better.

This post was published at Ludwig von Mises Institute on Jan 4, 2017.