Nation Institute Investigative Fund Fellow Kai Wright appeared on GRITtv with Laura Flanders to talk about what he has called a swamp of predatory lending that drowns struggling neighborhoods. Lending storefronts are often in working class or predominantly black neighborhoods, Kai reports.

Payday lenders defend the practice by saying borrowers "need this." While that may be true, these lenders take advantage of the poor by tacking on astronomical interest rates to the loans.

The majority of payday lenders would not be in business, Wright says, if it weren’t for "revolving lines of credit from Wall Street." And, ever since the era of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, laws instituted at the turn of the 20th century have been relaxed, making loan sharking easier and easier.

For more, read Kai Wright’s’ "Bad Credit: How Predatory Lenders Evade Regulation."

—Kevin Gosztola