FEW people will shed a tear at the news that tighter regulation means payday lenders could be facing hard times.
After all, isn't that what these vultures have dished out to the neediest people in society?
Adverts which gloss over annual percentage rates with several noughts at the end are enough to make any sensible individual choke on their cornflakes.
The problem is that many of the people who regularly take advantage of payday lenders struggle to fall into that category.
A few are genuine hard-luck or hard-up cases, people who've ended up in serious financial difficulty through no real fault of their own.
Unfortunately, many are people who either can't manage their money or struggle to understand basic finance. What will be leaping out of the page when they visit a payday lender's website are three things: how quickly they can get the money, what they might buy with it, or how it could help them solve an immediate cash crisis.
So the row of noughts on the APR won't even come into it. They may not even know what an Annual Percentage Rate is (the interest plus the fees).
Without being judgemental, it's pretty obvious that most of the people who regularly use payday lenders shouldn't.
The financial services industry will categorise them as higher than average risk because they can't make their income last and rely on credit. A simple principle comes into play at that point: the interest rates on anything they borrow will always be high.
In principle, there's nothing wrong with that. People are given low interest rates if they use credit sparingly or pay back regularly. Credit junkies who pay the interest only or miss payments altogether are the ones who'll be hit by that row of noughts.
That row of noughts sounds eye-wateringly expensive, and is – but only if you take a long time to pay back. Credit at 0.8 per cent a day means a £300 loan will cost you £6 in interest if you pay back within two weeks.
The payday lending industry has questions to answer about how scrupulous it has been in handing out money, and why it has sent threatening letters from non-existent law firms.
But killing payday lending does not wean addicts off the credit drug or educate people who don't understand money management.
Banks won't touch high-risk borrowers, and while we might wish credit unions or even the Church could step in, the reality is that neither has the capacity to meet market demand or pressing need.
If we want to solve this problem in the long-term, we'd be better putting personal finance on the school curriculum. Ridding the world of payday lenders might make a few people feel good. But I bet they don't borrow from them.
