During a speech at the annual Community Financial Services Association (CFSA), economist and actor Ben Stein said, "Payday lenders did not get bailed out by the big bailout," echoing similar sentiments of various payday lenders attending the annual CFSA conference in early March 2010 in Palm Springs, Calif.

Payday lenders are trying harder than ever to separate themselves from traditional financial institutions. Perhaps the larger reason payday lenders want to be separated from the mainstream banking industry, other than letting tax payers know their money didn't bail them out, is due to the threat of regulation by the impending formation of President Obama's Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). Currently the CFPA is being designed to not only regulate traditional banks but also other alternative lenders and financial products such as payday loans payday loans

Currently, Republican Senator Bob Corker from Tennesse is trying to combat Senator Christopher Dodd's, Democrat of Connecticut, legislation that grants the CFPA authority to write and enforce rules in the alternative financial product industry, in additional to regulating the traditional financial institutions.

Seven Schlein, a spokesman for the CFSA, told the New York Times,"the industry should not be dragged into the regulatory reform. The banks caused the financial meltdown, and they're spending millions and millions to spare themselves from tighter regulation while throwing the consumer lending industry under the bus," he said. "They're trying to divert attention to us."

Many payday lenders feel as if they are getting punished for something their "brother" industry did. Sighting that they were NOT responsible for the financial meltdown or recipients of tax payers money, but feel that they were the ones keeping our economy going by providing short-term loans for people in desperate need to make ends meet.