I’ve got a deal for you: when you’re in a pinch, I will loan you $30 but when you try to repay me a day later, you will owe me $88. No, this isn’t a payday loan or an auto title loan. These are the terms major banks insist on every day with millions of consumers through overdraft fees and loans. Consumers pay banks $17.5 billion per year in fees on $15.8 billion in overdraft loans, as the Center for Responsible Lending describes it in a new report. For every dollar the bank loans a customer, the bank asks for an average of $1.94 in fees (not including the $1 the customer owes on the loan).

And forget about asking for the annual interest rate on these incredibly short-term loans. The Federal Reserve considered issuing regulations requiring banks to report this information to their customers under the Truth-in-Lending Act, but banks successfully lobbied against them.  Fortunately, the House Financial Services Committee will be holding a hearing today on H.R. 946, the Consumer Overdraft Protection Fair Practices Act. This legislation would make such reporting mandatory. You can watch the hearing here.