Debbie Wasserman Schultz Shouldn't Be Welcoming Loan Sharks Into the Democratic Party

We know that the most vulnerable among us were hit the hardest during the 2008 financial crisis. Millions of people lost their jobs, their homes, and their bank accounts. That's enough to make you sick to your stomach. But for many, it got worse.

Predatory payday lenders stepped in to profit during the financial crisis. They targeted poor communities -- and people without access to credit from banks -- by offering them short-term loans at sky high interest rates.

Emails Show Pro-Payday Loan Study Was Edited By The Payday Loan Industry

The payday loan industry was involved in almost every aspect of a pro-industry academic study, according to emails and other documents reviewed by The Huffington Post. The revelation calls into question a host of other pro-industry academic studies that were paid for by the same organization.

While the researchers disclosed their funding source for the 2011 paper “Do Payday Loans Trap Consumers in a Cycle of Debt?” they also assured readers that the industry “exercised no control over the research or the editorial content of this paper.”

Will the Government Finally Regulate the Most Predatory Industry in America?

When Dana Jones first heard about payday loans, she was struggling to pay for prescriptions for her mother, who had been struck suddenly with mental illness. She borrowed a small amount that first time—just $50, she remembers—and paid it back when she got her next paycheck. It seemed simple enough, so she began drawing regularly on short-term credit. “I really thought it was a loan that worked like any other loan I had gotten from finance companies,” said Jones, who lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “I just didn’t know.”

Big Banks Offer Payday Loans At 300 Percent Interest: Study

Step aside, Tony Soprano: Big banks will now lend money at 300 percent interest without threatening to break a leg.

Then again, the payday loans some big banks are offering can have other ill effects, such as financial ruin, according to a new study by the Center for Responsible Lending. Even as public anxiety grows about the dangers of payday lending, with 15 states recently banning the practice, many big banks are offering the service to their customers.

Richard Cordray, CFPB Chief, Promises New Scrutiny Of Banks That Make Payday Loans

Picking his first public fight with the banking industry, Washington's top consumer cop, Richard Cordray, promised on Thursday that his examiners will scrutinize a handful of big banks that make high-cost loans. Inspection of major financial institutions will be part of a broader review of payday lenders, he said at a public hearing organized by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Birmingham, Ala.

The move is significant in that Cordray made no distinction between established financial institutions, including Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank, and less-respectable storefront and online payday lenders with names like EZ Money and AmeriCash Advance, widely criticized for making high-cost, short-term loans to the most desperate borrowers.

Although he was careful not to strike a directly confrontational tone, by specifically mentioning banks' high-cost loans in his first major speech as the new CFPB chief, Cordray suggested that his agency doesn't buy the bank industry line that its loans are not traditional payday products because they are structured differently.

Cordray did not single out any bank. But the listing of specific names of such payday lending programs in an examination guide released at the hearing -- such as Fifth Third Bank's "early access advance" -- is likely to chill the blood of bank executives, whose companies make big profits off payday loans.

"We recognize the need for emergency credit," Cordray said in a transcript of his opening remarks, provided in advance. "At the same time, it is important that these products actually help consumers, rather than harm them."