Portrait of a (Racist, mysogonistic) Subprime Lender: Allan Jones, Payday King

Gary Rivlin: Portrait of a Subprime Lender: Allan Jones, Payday King:

'via Blog this'

(Defaults are up. What did they expect?)

"It was at the end of a long day, the first of two we would spend together, that Allan Jones, the pioneer of the $40-billion-a-year payday industry, shared with me his views on race.

His town, Jones told me, has just enough blacks to put together a decent basketball team -- but not so many the good people of Cleveland, Tennessee need to worry about crime."

"I said to him, 'Forget all this theme-ing stuff, just hire female barbers with big titties.'" With a laugh, Doughball added that because Jones listened to him, "it's made a nice little profit ever since." If nothing else, the story reveals Jones to be a CEO willing to push ethical boundaries, at least if it means more money in his pocket. 

"...critics of payday have hurt his bottom line in recent years. Losing Ohio after a particularly bruising ballot initiative fight at the end of 2008 would cost him at least $1 million in profits, he complained -- and that didn't include the other store closures he had endured following recent political defeats in Oregon and New Hampshire.

He then kicked himself for failing to move into Europe a few years back when he had his chance. "I could really use that money now," Jones told me. His money was so tied up in jets and yachts and real estate and cars (a $300,000 Maybach, a vintage Rolls, a vintage Bentley) and horses, he moaned in an oh-woe-is-me-voice that was growing all-too-familiar, that he still hadn't finished the driveway to thegiant home he had built for himself modeled on the Biltmore, the stunning French chateau that a prior robber baron, George Vanderbilt, had built for himself a century earlier."