Category: Stakeholder Protection

Christians and Payday Lending

~ MD Harris Institute ~ 7 Comments

Is payday lending a scourge to the poor, or is it a chance to help them past a tough financial spot? Are people responsible and capable of making the best decisions for themselves may be the real question.  

By Mark D. Harris

I recently attended a conference in which there was a debate on payday lending, a hot button issue. One side argues that payday lending violates Biblical restrictions on rates of interest and oppresses the poor. The other side contends that payday lending provides small, short term albeit expensive loans that provide financial flexibility for people without credit cards or bank accounts, and that ultimately such flexibility helps borrowers. At the conference, payday lending was defined as follows:

“The practice of lending small amounts of money, usually $350 or less, to individuals for two week periods (i.e. until the next pay day), potentially trapping borrowers in an endless cycle of two week loans, often at an annual interest rate up to or exceeding 360%.”

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Getting Rich vs. Growing Rich in Investments

green tree
~ MD Harris Institute ~ Leave a comment

Reliable wealth grows like an oak tree…slowly, steadily, and faithfully. How can you grow rich investing?

By Mark D. Harris

King Solomon once noted that there is really nothing new under the sun. Others have opined that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Acquiring wealth is no exception.

Get Rich Quickly?

People have been trying to “get rich quick” since the dawn of time, and the vast majority have been wiped out, physically or financially, as a result. In antiquity, defeating your enemies in battle and plundering them was a great path to violent death for most, but great riches for a few.

In later times, the Dutch economy foundered under the frenzy known as Tulipmania (1636-7), British investors went broke in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble (1719-1721), and the French lost heavily investing in the Mississippi Company (1719).

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Confidence in Hard Economic Times

~ MD Harris Institute ~ Leave a comment

Hard times are inevitable in every life, but their are ways to weather them.

The chattering class in Washington DC and elsewhere is abuzz with concern about the “fiscal cliff”, involving legislation passed in the summer of 2011 requiring tax increases and spending cuts to decrease the exploding US Federal deficit. The Washington Post suggests that this “fiscal cliff” would raise taxes over $2,000 per year on many middle income families, decrease spending, fray the safety net, and push the US economy into another recession. The “fiscal cliff” is simply the latest in a series of financial troubles that have plagued man throughout history, including such the Dutch Tulip Mania of 1720, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Great Recession of 2008, and countless others. As always, the media is convulsed with worry, ordinary people differ in their responses, with some feeling helpless, others ambivalent, and a few confident.

Though I have not done formal interviews, those who feel helpless seem to believe that they will lose their jobs, their expenses will skyrocket, and there is nothing that they can do about it. These people wring their hands in fear and impotence and find it harder to function in their day to day lives. Those who are ambivalent usually don’t know what is going on. A few have confidence based on their assumption that everything will turn out fine because it always has in the past.

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