Word: loans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...town in a silver Jaguar and has started plans to build a shopping center. The reasons for his rapid rise: long hours of work, plenty of thrift and $4,800 in start-up capital from an unconventional source. Like thousands of other immigrants, the budding entrepreneur tapped an ethnic loan club for his seed money...
Such clubs amount to informal, small-scale banks organized primarily by immigrants to help one another. Though the loan clubs are not legally prohibited, they operate outside regular U.S. banking laws and safeguards. Even so, they have nurtured fledgling businesses from the barrio to Chinatown in cities as diverse as Houston, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. With loans ranging from a few hundred dollars to $20,000 or more, Vietnamese hui (associations) in Texas played a crucial role in reviving the moribund shrimping industry in the Gulf of Mexico by financing the purchase of dozens of boats. An estimated...
Most of the clubs operate on the same basic principle: a group of people, often ten or 20, contribute the same amount of money each month to a kitty, which is immediately loaned to one of them. All club members, including the borrower, continue to make the monthly payments until everyone has received the purse once. By that time, each participant has borrowed and repaid the entire loan. The organizer, who is typically female, keeps a record of payments and vouches for newcomers until the club disbands. "It's like Weight Watchers," says Ivan Light, a professor of sociology...
Bennett has since attacked the likes of Harvard for jacking costs above $12,000 with the help of federal student-loan support and for "ripping off" undergraduates with suffused curriculums that Bennett derides as "core lite." He has detonated heavy controversy by advocating federal vouchers to finance parental choice among public schools -- typically, say opponents, white schools for white kids living in mixed neighborhoods. He has called for AIDS testing of all marriage-license applicants, hospital patients and convicts and has unloaded on Republicans and Democrats alike who opposed the President's Iranian and contra policies. All that after Brother...
...House, Democratic Whip Tony Coelho used a 112-ft. yacht and Learjet belonging to Vernon Savings & Loan to entertain contributors and fly to fund- raising parties. Federal thrift regulators last year charged the Texas bank's officers with looting it; two have pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the case. Last year Coelho lobbied for a $5 billion bill to bail out the industry. Coelho has admitted he was wrong to use the yacht and jet; he and the Democrats' campaign committee paid Vernon $48,450 for their...