Banks fall over themselves to lend to rich customers who promise large glittering deposits and low risks. They tempt them with sweet deals and low rates. The less well-off are treated very differently. Many at the bottom are denied credit from mainstream lenders, or forced to pay higher premiums. In the wake of the financial crisis, more of us are slipping into this category. We are compelled to find credit elsewhere. Payday loans are therefore on the rise. Loan Sharks lifts the lid on this industry and exposes the growing power that it wields. Documenting the rise of the industry with detailed evidence, Carl Packman shows that, although there have always been loan sharks, there has never anything as large and powerful as the current set of payday loan companies operating virtually unchecked in the mainstream of the UK. But this book goes further than simply analysing the problems: it also offers an honest discussion about practical solutions.

Payday Lending looks at the growth of the high cost credit industry from the early payday lending industry in the early 1990s to its development in the US as a highly profitable industry around the world.

In this intriguing and accessible book, Mayer presents the history of payday lending using the colorful (and sometimes criminal) city of Chicago as a case in point. With an eye to the future, Mayer also aptly assesses the consequences of high-interest lending - both for the people who borrow at such steep prices and for society as a whole.-publisher description.

Predatory lending: A problem rooted in the past that continues today. Looking for an investment return that could exceed 500 percent annually; maybe even twice that much? Private, unregulated lending to high-risk borrowers is the answer, or at least it was in the United States for much of the period from the Civil War to the onset of the early decades of the twentieth century. Newspapers called the practice “loan sharking” because lenders employed the same ruthlessness as the great predators in the ocean. Slowly state and federal governments adopted laws and regulations curtailing the practice, but organized crime continued to operate much of the business. In the end, lending to high-margin investors contributed directly to the Wall Street crash of 1929. Loan Sharks is the first history of predatory lending in the United States. It traces the origins of modern consumer lending to such older practices as salary buying and hidden interest charges. Yet, as Geisst shows, no-holds barred loan sharking is not a thing of the past. Many current lending practices employed today by credit card companies, payday lenders, and providers of consumer loans would have been easily recognizable at the end of the nineteenth century. Geisst demonstrates the still prevalent custom of lenders charging high interest rates, especially to risky borrowers, despite attempts to control the practice by individual states. Usury and loan sharking have not disappeared a century and a half after the predatory practices first raised public concern.

Payday Lending looks at the growth of the high cost credit industry from the early payday lending industry in the early 1990s to its development in the US as a highly profitable industry around the world.