Follow the Money: Payday Laundry Edition

Gretchen Morgenson is asking some interesting questions about where the money comes to fund predatory loans. The issue boils down to this:  the most questionable consumer is not done by depositories.  It's done by finance companies or (prior to 2008) by mortgage banks.  That means that these lenders need another source of funding for their loans. That could be their investors' equity, but more typically it is via lines of credit from other financial institutions. Absent lines of credit from large financial institutions, the amount of high-risk lending done in the US would likely be substantially less.
I hope that bank regulators (and Congress) start asking why banks are willing to fund loans that they aren't willing to make directly themselves because of reputational concerns. The current situation looks a lot like a rent-a-BIN variation:  instead of the bank providing the front to avoid usury laws or to enable MC/Visa card issuance, here we have the rent-a-finance-company situation, with the banks basically undertaking predatory lending behind the mask of the finance companies. Specifically, it sure looks as if NY banks were financing on-line payday lenders that made loans to NY residents at rates that violated the NY usury laws. (Let me emphasize that the issue here is not whether payday loans are good or bad--that's a separate discussion--but simply whether the NY usury laws were violated.)

http://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2013/09/follow-the-money-payday-laundry-edition.html