There are people out there who, when you add in fees and work it all out as an annual number (APR) charge hundreds of percent for short term loans.
There are those who think that such lenders should be curbed, constrained, even banned. What\’s the effect of doing so?
Loan sharks are illegal money lenders who charge high rates of interest, in some cases as much as 2,500,000 per cent .
The report\’s author, Chris Leslie, said: "There is evidence to suggest that the pernicious trend of illegal unsecured lending at extremely high rates of interest, or loan sharking, is making a comeback.
"The diminished availability of regulated sub-prime credit is creating conditions where a sizeable number of people have little option but to borrow from illegal sources.
Yup, people turn to the unlicenced lenders who charge even higher rates. Probably not all that good an idea constraining the legal ones then, eh?
This result was so blindingly obvious that even dimwitted politicians must have known that this would be the consequence of their legalization.