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Wall Street banks and financial interests have so far reported spending more than $1.2 billion on lobbying and campaign contributions, according to AFR’s updated “Wall Street Money in Washington” report. That works out to just under $1.8 million a day or an average of $2.3 million spent to elect or influence each of the 535 members of the Senate and House of Representatives.
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The Institute on Agriculture and Trade Policy and Americans for Financial Reform submitted a joint comment on position limits for commodities to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
AFR and 43 additional organizations sent a letter to members of Congress urging them to oppose any efforts to dismantle, weaken, or change the structure of the CFPB, which was established by Congress to ensure that markets work in an open, transparent, and fair way for consumers. Failure to appropriately regulate the consumer financial marketplace was a central cause of the financial crisis that devastated the U.S. and global economies; the CFPB is a shining success story of the efforts to correct the mistakes and close the gaps that led to that failure. The letter urges members of Congress to support the CFPB in fulfilling its consumer protection mission, rather than undermine it.
“Americans for Financial Reform welcomes the President’s proposed tax on the liabilities of large banks. Since the tax would fall specifically on debt liabilities, it would create incentives against excessive leverage in the financial sector, while raising revenue as well… We also see the President’s bank tax proposal as contributing to a broad and emerging consensus on the appropriateness of taxing the financial sector commensurately with its profits.”
Download the letter here.
“Since December, Congress has twice passed measures to weaken regulations in the Dodd-Frank financial law that are intended to reduce the risk of another financial meltdown. In the last election cycle, Wall Street banks and financial interests spent over $1.2 billion on lobbying and campaign contributions, according to Americans for Financial Reform. Their spending strategy appears to be working. Just this week, the House passed further legislation that would delay by two years some key provisions of Dodd-Frank. “[Banks] want to be able to do things their way, and that’s very dangerous.” MIT economist Simon Johnson tells Bill.
“Marcus Stanley, policy director of Americans for Financial Reform, which backs tougher regulation of Wall Street, said banks and their Republican allies were seeking to chip away at Dodd-Frank with a series of piecemeal delays and limits on regulatory authority. ‘The strategy is to take many of these bills and amendments and combine them together into packaged legislation. In combination, these so-called technical fixes will very significantly undermine Dodd-Frank and make it impossible to effectively police the financial sector,’ he said.”
If federal regulations and ethical standards for pension fund asset managers are to have “any meaning,” the Department of Labor must not give Credit Suisse a waiver, say AFR and the AFL-CIO in a joint statement.
Don’t open the floodgates to a wave of “wrong number” calls to cell phones, say AFR, NCLC and more than 75 national and state groups in a letter urging the FCC to stand by the safeguards of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
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