Ralph’s Harvard Law School classmate and corporate governance expert, Robert A. G. Monks, explains how CEOs enrich themselves at the expense of productive investment. And law professor, Mehrsa Baradaran proposes an alternative to putting your money into the big bad banks.
Richard Master, Nomi Prins
November 8, 2015
Arno J. Mayer, David Helvarg
November 22, 2015
Robert A.G. Monks is a pioneering shareholder activist and a corporate governance advisor. He has written extensively about shareholder rights and responsibilities. He is also an expert onpension and retirement plans and was appointed director of the United States Synthetic Fuels Corporation by President Ronald Reagan. Mr. Monks was also a founder of Institutional Shareholder Services, now the leading corporate governance consulting firm. He was also featured in the documentary “The Corporation”and was the subject of the biography A Traitor To His Class: Robert A. G. Monks and the Battle to Change Corporate America by Hilary Rosenberg.
Mehrsa Baradaran is an associate professor of Law at the University of Georgia where she teaches Contracts and Banking Law. She has written on banking issues for many prestigious law journals including “It’s Time For Postal Banking” for the Harvard Law Review Forum. She is also the author of How The Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation and the Threat to Democracy.
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I recently witnessed a presentation by Mr. Nader at The Marijuana Business Expo in Las Vegas. He was fantastic! As if the cannabis convention wasn’t already an environment filled with optimism and energy, Mr. Nader 10x’ed it.
But, on this issue of enabling US taxpayers and the Post Office to provide and service payday loan styled products – insane. Payday loan lenders are leaving the industry in droves? Why? FINTECH (financial technology). Prosper, Lending Club, ENOVA, AVANT, peer-to-peer lending…
The current disruption in the financial services industry is astounding. A multitude of lenders are already offering sub-36% APR uncollateralized loans in the U.S., China, Brazil… even Latvia.
Brick-n-mortar businesses – aka the Post Office – are fading. These tired, antecdotal stories about folks like Tanya in North Carolina, although sad, are ending fast. (The reader should be aware North Carolina phased payday loan products out more than 15 years ago.) But, Professor Baradaran puts this out for consumption once again.
Don’t misunderstand me. “How the Other Half Banks” is worth your time and money if you have an interest in this topic.
Another “expert” worth your investment is Professor Lisa J. Servon. She has worked in the trenches – a Ritecheck in Harlem and the South Bronx. (Google her. Good example of her views in The New Yorker.)
By the time our US Post Office figures out how to loan and collect money, they will be discovered to be just another dinosaur. It will soon be the same for the stereotypical payday loan lender who fails to grasp the changes and tech about to bury her under another McDonalds location.
As Persident Clinton once said, “It’s about the phone, stupid.”
And finally, so there is no need to Google me, I have an agenda. I admit to being a LONG TIME payday loan lender. Like Professor Servon, I’ve worked the other side of the counter; in the trenches. I know my clients personally. And, as is the case for the majority of my brothers and sisters in the PDL space, I never buried any of them under an avalanche of perpetual debt. Jer Trihouse