Online Payday Loans

Truth in Payday Lending

Tommy Moore

Category: Quotes, Proponent — Wednesday, August 8, 2007

“It is discouraging that a paper as prestigious as the Washington Post failed to do its homework on our issue. We offered to sit down with the editorial writer who refused to meet us. Instead she took the word of a disingenuous anti-business activist group, the Center for Responsible Lending, reprinting their factually inaccurate charges verbatim from their talking points.”

Recently appointed CFSA Executive Vice President Tommy Moore attacked a Washington Post editor and the Center for Responsible Lending over an editorial that opposed payday lending…

According to a press release issued by the Community Financial Services Association of America (CFSA), Moore sent a letter to Washington Post editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, demanding that the paper issue a correction due to “many factual errors” and “errors of omission” in their August 1st editorial.

Moore claimed that the writer refused to meet with his organization and wrote the editorial based on “inaccurate” information provided by the Center for Responsible Lending, an organization that opposes payday lending.

The Washington Post editorial claimed:

  • the average customer pays $793 for a $325 loan
  • 12 states have moved against payday lending
  • consumers were not adversely affected in these 12 states (other lenders “filled the gap” left by payday lenders)

Moore argued:

  • the figure $793 for a $325 loan is incorrect (a false conclusion based on misinterpreted data)
  • no states have banned payday lending (payday lenders choose not to offer short-term loans in these 12 states because rate caps make it unprofitable to do so)
  • consumers in these 12 states who previously used payday loans to avoid expensive NSF fees were not consulted for the editorial (in one of the 12 states, after three years of losing fee income, credit unions showed their first increase in NSF fee income in the year payday lenders were driven out of the state)

Moore also questioned the Washington Post’s editorial quality:

“Newspapers are allowed to have opinions, but they should be informed opinions.”

Tommy Moore is a former Democratic gubernatorial candidate who resigned from a 26-year Aiken County Senate seat to become executive vice president of the Community Financial Services Association of America (CFSA), a payday loan industry trade organization.

Source:　Payday Advance Industry Fires Back at Washington Post - Demands Correction of Factual Errors and Misstatements (Community Financial Services Association of America Newsroom)

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