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George Benston's indefatigable pursuit of the truth about perennially troublesome questions involved in the market behavior of regulated financial institutions deserves a better fate than he met with the empirical results of this paper. In the relatively short time I have had to reflect on his paper, I have come to the conclusion that his problems arose mainly from deficiencies in his data, some heroic attempts to adjust the data to allow for vital considerations which could not be measured directly, and some problems of mis-specification or multi-collinearity which deprived him of results which would be more consistent with the theory he presents at the beginning of his paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has established that finance companies accept poorer credit risks for personal loans where legal rate ceilings are higher. This finding suggests that the volume of personal loans extended or outstanding might also be positively associated with legal rate ceilings, but the supply of finance company personal loans has displayed positive, negative, and zero correlations with interest rate levels. There are two major reasons for this past chaos concerning supply: The credit data utilized have been faulty, and the model specifications have been inadequate. The purpose of this paper is to overcome these deficiencies. The first section below contains a brief description of the credit data that will be employed. The second section contains our model specifications. The test results are presented in section three. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Economic inequality in the United States is extreme, but little is known about the national origin of affluent households. Households in the top one percent by total wealth own vastly disproportionate quantities of household assets and have correspondingly high levels of economic, social, and political influence. The overrepresentation of white natives (i.e., those born in the U.S.) among high-wealth households is well-documented, but changing migration dynamics suggest that a growing portion of top households may be immigrants. Methods: Because no single survey dataset contains top wealth holders and data about country of origin, this paper uses two publicly-available data sets: the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Multiple imputation is used to impute country of birth from the SIPP into the SCF. Descriptive statistics are used to demonstrate reliability of the method, to estimate the prevalence of immigrants among top wealth holders, and to document patterns of asset ownership among affluent immigrants. Results: Significant numbers of top wealth holders who are usually classified as white natives may be immigrants. Many top wealth holders appear to be European and Canadian immigrants, and increasing numbers of top wealth holders are likely from Asia and Latin America as well. Results suggest that of those in the top one percent of wealth holders, approximately 3% are European and Canadian immigrants, .5% are from Mexico or Cuban, and 1.7% are from Asia (especially Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China, and India). Ownership of key assets varies considerably across affluent immigrant groups. Conclusion: Although the percentage of top wealth holders who are immigrants is relatively small, these percentages represent large numbers of households with considerable resources and corresponding social and political influence. Evidence that the propensity to allocate wealth to real and financial assets varies across immigrant groups suggests that wealth ownership is more global than previous research suggests and that immigrant groups are likely to become more prevalent in top wealth positions in the U.S. As the representation of immigrants in top wealth positions grows, their economic, social, and political influence is likely to increase as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an update on consumer credit and payments in the U.S. as of the 1st quarter of 2006. Differences between the objectives of private providers and payment services and the Federal Reserve System; Credit contract choices of consumers; Expectations of consumers to minimize borrowing costs.

The article presents an exploratory study to examine the predatory and deceptive nature of refund anticipation loans (RALs) in the United States. Data were gathered from a medium-sized midwestern city. Results indicate that deception exists because RAL marketing communication does not provide essential information regarding effective interest rates and effective costs. Consumers are making decisions based on erroneous beliefs about the product. When the real cost of the loan is revealed, behavior is likely to change.

Economic geographers have deployed a variety of spatial categories (e.g., scale, territory and border) to describe and theorize the spatiality of market making and marketization processes. This article supplements these accounts with insights from the work of post-structural geographers oriented toward the site. To this end, the article introduces the notion of the marketsite. Marketsites are points where heterogeneous elements are brought together and assembled in an effort to realize the conditions required for the performance of model markets and market subjectivities. Using the example of smart disclosure, the article argues that the use of disclosure labels to improve consumer decision making has transformed the point of sale and other transactional junctures into incipient marketsites—niches where various behavioral techniques are deployed to summon into being subjects who behave as if they were Homines economici. The behavioral turn in economics has focused the market-making efforts of a variety of actors on the market subject and strategic sites in people’s everyday lives where they can be guided and nudged into alignment with market models. Together such marketsites delineate a new, and largely uncharted, geography of encounter between (behavioral) economic theory and actually existing markets. Drawing on fieldwork developing and testing a fee disclosure box for a prepaid debit card, I show that the production of marketsites, where Homo economicus can survive, is a messy process that rarely succeeds. Regardless, such efforts reveal valuable insights into how the behavioral turn in economics is reshaping the spatiality of market-making processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the developments made in the field of lending and financial technology industry in the U.S. Topics discussed include national bank charter proposed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for regulating the financial technology industry; enactment of Federal Trade Commission Act and the and Consumer Financial Protection Act for protecting consumers; and legitimacy of the charter.

The owned home is central to both the American Dream and the financial lives of U.S. households. This article explores the typical financial trajectories of homeowners during the Great Recession, assessing the viability of positioning home equity at the core of a household's balance sheet. Using the 2007–2009 reinterview panel of the Survey of Consumer Finances, we describe the diverse balance sheets of groups of homeowning households. While some homeowners lost equity and wealth in the Great Recession, we find that an owned home introduced severe risk of loss, but homeowners were less likely than renters to lose very large proportions of their wealth. The experience of homeowners' balance sheets during the downturn was diverse, and the typical experiences of different groups are compared and contrasted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an examination of the impact of the United States' Uniform Small Loan Law (USLL) of 1907-1930 and discusses the role the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) played in bringing about the passage of the USLL. It discusses issues related to the law, including the high rates of interest that were associated with the small loan business and the benefits and drawbacks of making credit available to poor and working people. Additionally, the article examines why some states passed the law much more quickly than others.