Lender bender!

CFPB rule to benefit the payday biz

A federal banking agency said it’s angling to roll back looming restrictions on highinterest payday loans that were slated to take effect in August.

The proposal by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would nix a requirement, proposed in 2017 by the Obama administration, that payday lenders vet whether borrowers have enough money to pay back their loans before fronting them cash.

The rule, which was expected last month but ended up delayed partly because of the government shutdown, is part of a tug-of-war in Washington over how to regulate the payday industry, which had close ties to the agency’s former acting director, Mick Mulvaney.

“The Bureau is preliminarily finding that rescinding this requirement would in- crease consumer access to credit,” the CFPB said in a statement.

The agency’s move immediately triggered backlash from anti-payday advocates, who claim that the industry victimizes its cash-strapped clientele.

“Nothing has changed in the payday lending industry in the last 18 months that demands a rollback of these protections,” Linda Jun, senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Re- form, said in a statement.

“The only thing that has changed is that the CFPB leadership has decided to do the bidding of payday lenders,” Jun added.

The agency, run by Kathy Kraninger, said there was “insufficient evidence and legal support” for the Obama-era regulations.

The CFPB initially relied heavily on the payday loan research of a Columbia Law School professor, Ronald Mann — who The Post first reported last week had done free work for an industry lawyer.

In the notice of the proposed rulemaking, the CFPB backtracks from relying on Mann, since the data he used were limited to one payday lender in five states.

“The Bureau preliminarily believes the limited data from the Mann study was not sufficiently robust and representative,” the CFBP said.