Will payday loan providers begin popping up on street corners in affluent neighborhoods as the economy goes south?

Will the need for short term cash coupled with the reduction in availability of credit going to force consumers to look to high-interest short term loans that are often accompanied with exorbitant fees?

This remains to be seen. Many people have the impression driving through a neighborhood with high number of pawn shops or payday loan providers is indicative of a high crime rate, dropping property values, high unemployment, and more. Some pawn shop owners are resisiting those generalizations. But, to be fair, pawn shops have historically been associated with crime for a reason. Before electronic background checks it was very difficult for an associate at a pawn shop to determine if they items they were buying were stolen. High crime rates bring a demand for outlets to fence goods.

But payday loan providers aren’t so directly tied to crime rates. So why the demand in poor neighborhoods? There’s a myriad of them. The demographic characteristics of many poor neighborhoods include lack of access to traditional lenders, lack of credit or bad credit, and a lack of understanding of fees and interest rates associated with payday loans as compared with traditional usury outlets.

Will the presence of payday loan stores increase while the economy declines? Will this put more borrowers under water? If the trend occurs it’s likely to occur soon. Unless people begin to look for payday loan providers online.

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Mark Tahiliani

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According to a report from the ACLU the government has admitted to having more than 1 million individuals on the terrorism watch list.

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President Bush has said some stupid things before but so far this is the dumbest statement he’s made so far. In July.

“Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.” –George W. Bush, in parting words to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy at his final G8 Summit, punching the air and grinning widely as the two leaders looked on in shock, Rusutsu, Japan, July 10, 2008

That wasn’t all.

Mr Bush also faced criticism at the summit after Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, was described in the White House press pack given to journalists as one of the “most controversial leaders in the history of a country known for government corruption and vice”.

The White House apologised for what it called “sloppy work” and said an official had simply lifted the characterisation from the internet without reading it.

From Google News.

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As of 7/9/2008 the cost of the Iraq War has exceeded $535 trillion. According to <a href=”http://www.nationalpriorities.org”>Nationalpriorities.org that comes down to more than $5,800 per household, $2,147 per person. This amounts to more than $300 million per day.

To put that in perspective, taxpayers in the city of Chicago, having spent $6.9 billion on the war so far, could have paid the salaries for more than 100,000 elementary school teachers for a year. They could have provided scholarships for more than 650,000 university students for one year. Or they could have provided every person in the city health care for one year.

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Americans are glum at the moment. No, I mean really glum. In April, a new poll revealed that 81 percent of the American people believe that the country is on the “wrong track.” In the 25 years that pollsters have asked this question, last month’s response was by far the most negative. Other polls, asking similar questions, found levels of gloom that were even more alarming, often at 30- and 40-year highs. There are reasons to be pessimistic—a financial panic and looming recession, a seemingly endless war in Iraq, and the ongoing threat of terrorism. But the facts on the ground—unemployment numbers, foreclosure rates, deaths from terror attacks—are simply not dire enough to explain the present atmosphere of malaise.

American anxiety springs from something much deeper, a sense that large and disruptive forces are coursing through the world. In almost every industry, in every aspect of life, it feels like the patterns of the past are being scrambled. “Whirl is king, having driven out Zeus,” wrote Aristophanes 2,400 years ago. And—for the first time in living memory—the United States does not seem to be leading the charge. Americans see that a new world is coming into being, but fear it is one being shaped in distant lands and by foreign people.

Look around. The world’s tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn’t make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world’s ten richest people are American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories.

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Mark Tahiliani is the president and CEO Awareness Corporation.

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(Niall )Ferguson sees turmoil possibly spreading through the Middle East as religious and ethnic groups finally sort themselves out, almost a century after Turkey’s vast Ottoman Empire broke apart at World War I’s end and the British and French rearranged the pieces to suit their interests.

In his classic study of those times, “A Peace to End All Peace,” Boston University’s Fromkin quoted an American missionary who warned the British in Baghdad against tying Arab and Kurdish provinces, Sunni and Shiite provinces together: “You are flying in the face of four millenniums of history if you try to draw a line around Iraq and call it a political entity!”

Source.

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The bombings, in a crowded market, were among the most deadly attacks since last fall’s bombings in Sadr City killing 144 people.

From NYTimes.com.

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Coalition forces have recently captured a documents in an unsurgent safehouse that indicate plans to attack inside the United States using a simlilar strategy to gain entry to the country that the 911 attackers used - student visas.

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