This New England

The Boston Globe commendably raised this issue in a recent editorial, citing the damage-repair record after the recent ice storm in interior Massachusetts.

The state should do what it can to encourage the creation of more municipally owned electric companies. Consider the good job that the munis did in the recent ice storm that hit large sections of interior Massachusetts so badly and the not so good job of investor-owned utilities.

Quite right. The munis are not driven by the obsession with quarterly earnings of investor-owned companies -- a short-term obsession that has gotten much of corporate America into trouble because it tends to discourage long-term franchise building (i.e., customer relations). Such things as preventive maintenance can get shoved aside by some companies whose managements want to prop up profits and stock prices at least as long as the managements are in power.

Of course, public agencies can do a bad job too. What we need is something of a balance between the privately owned and municipally owned utilitiies, to give the discipline of competition.

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New Hampshire is putting a cap on payday loans, albeit at a ridiculously high 36 percent annual rate. This has caused South Carolina Advance America Cash Advance to whine that it can't make money at that usurious rate.

What happened to the usury laws that used to protect Americans? They went away with the arrival of the lobbyists for the credit-card-companies and payday-loan outfits.

Certainly there's plenty of evidence that America's over-reliance on borrowing even as obscene rates are charged (especially including those adjustable-rate mortgages) has helped put us in the current economic fix.

 Tags  payday loans

Comments

Saul Ricklin said:

If you tyhink 36% interest is ridiculously high think about the current 300% the cap is intended to replace

Link | December 30, 2008 12:58 PM
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cash advance software said:

Low on cash because of the Holidays? Get a payday loan! They are cheap, fast, easy and very convenient.

Link | December 30, 2008 4:19 PM
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payday loans said:

what no one realizes is that APR"ANNUAL percentage rate"....means a whole year! no one is going to have a payday loan out a whole year, and even if they do most states already have a limit on how long a company can charge interest. like for instance in utah a company can only charge interest for 12 weeks.

Link | January 2, 2009 5:50 PM
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