Cyclopedia on Pawnbroking; Small Loans and Finance Companies, Operations, Regulations

General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1943 Original Publisher: J.W. Taylor publishing co. Subjects: Pawnbroking Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: Chapter Three GENERAL PAWNBROKING PROBLEMS Determination of the interest rate, and a workable set of state regulations are, no doubt, the major problems of the pawnbroking business. Police supervision, for reasons which will be discussed later, is a close third. The two major issues are subjects of separate chapter treatment. But the direction, effects and remedies of those major problems are conditioned by secondary problems which are part of the very fabric of pawnbroking, and capable of producing correspondingly realistic effects. An example is the pawnbrokers' legislative lobby. It is chiefly the unscientific state of affairs with respect to interest rates and general public regulation, as well as the wide diversity of statutory provisions, which encourages pawnbrokers to maintain lobbies in a number of states. Conversely, the lobbies have been one of the chief contributing factors to the maintenance of uneconomic and antisocial conditions in the pawnbroking business. Time and circumstances have made the profession unpretentiously skillful in its dealings with the courts and legislative bodies. A retired anonomous London pawnbroker, writing in 1744, thus exposed the forerunner of moderntechniques for joint protection against common enemies: "It is a fact well known to all in the trade - that a certain individual now resident near town, who had exhibited much ingenuity in detecting frauds committed under the Act (Pawnbrokers' Act) was held in pay, and I believe is still employed by the Pawnbrokers, at the annual sum from each...