I do not think I have explained sufficiently why I do not think...

I do not think I have explained sufficiently why I do not think they differ that much. At a basic desk level some of those short term loans you refer to will become delinquent and often the lender will revise them time and time again and treat them as a fresh loan for accounting purposes thus keeping them off both provisions for bad debts and writeoffs even though at the very best they should have been provisioned. So there is a percentage of payers whose short term loans become a series of short term loans over a much longer period. This of course is similar to the payment arrangements often made by PDP companies. There are plenty of ways of hiding poor credit decisions if you have old streetwise collection staff who will keep their collection figures looking good - even for the auditors. So I say at a desk level I found it pretty much the same. However if you want to look at the accounting treatment and the regulations I would agree with you - and that is where I also see the anomaly. Maybe we can agree to disagree because I cannot dismiss what I saw and did in my career.