Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/06/2015 21:01 -0400
“I don’t hide tattoos, I don’t take earrings out. I just don’t do that, because ultimately if you don’t like who I am, you’re not going to like what I do.”
Who knows what that is supposed to mean, but it’s a quote from Douglas Merrill who, as Bloomberg notes, “has peacock feathers tattooed down his left arm, black fingernail polish, [and] chin-length hair.”
Two other things Douglas has are a Ph.D. in cognitive science from Princeton and the online version of a payday lender called ZestFinance.
Now make no mistake, payday lenders are bad because what they do is trap low-income households in a perpetual debt cycle and they do it in the name of providing credit to those who wouldn’t normally have access to it.
In other words: the pitch is that before you think about criticizing a payday lender for charging an APR that amounts to 30%, you should actually think about whether you should be praising them for helping America’s downtrodden debt serfs get into still more debt.
Of course we’re employing quite a bit of trademark sarcasm here. Payday lenders have been proven time and again to be largely predatory in nature, capitalizing off of the desperation of poor people albeit with a business model that comes with substantial risk because.. well… because the business model depends on collecting interest payments from those same poor people who have just been made poorer-er-er by the fact that they took out yet another loan they most certainly can’t afford to service.
Continue reading “Fortress Backs Hundred Million Dollar Subprime, Payday Lender Scheme: “He Has Peacock Feathers Tattooed Down His Left Arm””
