Congress Causes Credit Card Customers to Jump to Sharks

From today's WSJ, George Mason's Todd Zywicki on how Congress has pushed credit card users and bank customers into the arms of payday lenders, pawn brokers, and other less-savory substitutes:

In his letter to shareholders last spring, Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan Chase reported that, "In the future, we no longer will be offering credit cards to approximately 15 percent of the customers to whom we currently offer them. This is mostly because we deem them too risky in light of new regulations restricting our ability to make adjustments over time as the client's risk profile changes." Meet the new payday loan customers.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Me on payday lending and unintended consequences here. Me on the Credit CARD Act here. A video on payday lending featuring Zywicki here.