Broke, U.S.A

With Congress possibly days from creating the first federal organization purely directed toward protecting consumers of financial products, payday lenders, check cashers, and providers of instant tax refunds face significant federal regulation for the first time. As the future-Consumer Financial Protection Bureau prepares to take on that work it is critical that they possess the best possible understanding of the “fringe” banking sector, its impact on low-income Americans and the economic collapse of 2008.

That’s one of the reasons we’re thrilled to be hosting Gary Rivlin on July 20th for a discussion of his timely new book, Broke, USA. The book goes a long way in explaining that story from the perspective of the families that are enmeshed in the “fringe” and from some of the key figures who made that sector into the multi-billion dollar industry that exists today.

Unsurprisingly, the less people know, the more they run into trouble. Gary Rivlin’s blistering new examination of the subprime economy, “Broke, U.S.A.,” is full of stories of financially ignorant people bamboozled into making bad decisions—refinancing out of low-interest mortgages, say, or buying overpriced credit insurance—by a consumer finance industry adept at creating confusing products. Such stories are backed up by the numbers. A study by economists at the Atlanta Fed found that thirty per cent of people in the lowest quartile of financial literacy thought they had a fixed-rate mortgage when in fact they had an adjustable-rate one. A study of subprime borrowers in the Northeast found that, of the people who scored in the bottom quartile on a very basic test of calculation skills, a full twenty per cent had been foreclosed on, compared with just five per cent of those in the top quartile.