This report from Americans for Financial Reform compiles votes in the 115th Congress around financial reform, and makes clear Wall Street’s success in driving its deregulatory agenda. Ten years after the financial crisis, a majority of members of Congress have voted again and again for bills pushed by the bank lobby that are dangerous for our financial stability, undermine consumer and investor protections, and enable racial discrimination in lending.
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From Carter Dougherty at Americans for Financial Reform: “Trump’s man at the SEC, Jay Clayton, can be pretty Trumpy. Just as everything is ‘tremendous’ or ‘huge’ in Trumpworld, Clayton’s SEC has called its marquee investor-protection rule ‘Regulation Best Interest.’ It’s anything but.”
In Mick Mulvaney’s final hours as acting director, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed two policies that put consumers at gravely increased risk of the very harm the CFPB is supposed to prevent.
Given the evidence that, after being provided a summary relationship disclosure, investors still cannot fully understand, and in some cases misunderstand, fundamental differences in the nature of the brokerage and advisory relationships and the respective duties they are owed, the different fees they would pay, or how various conflicts of interest can influence the recommendations they receive, a regulatory regime that relies on disclosure for investors to make an informed decision about what type of financial professional to work with and what type of account to use is certain to fail.
The Senate majority has endorsed a CFPB nominee indistinguishable from Mick Mulvaney, who has done his level best to dismantle from within an agency that once won real results for American families hurt by Wall Street and predatory lenders. Kraninger has no track record at all of consumer protection, or of standing up for vulnerable people.
Kathy Kraninger has put no daylight whatsoever between herself and Mick Mulvaney, who has done his level best to dismantle from within an agency that once won real results for American families hurt by Wall Street and predatory lenders. He has subverted, not advanced, the mission of consumer protection for which Congress created the CFPB.
Today’s financial stability report from the Federal Reserve clearly documents that we are at or near the peak of an economic cycle, with inflated asset prices and strong lending growth leading to signs of excessive leverage in the corporate sector. The peak of the cycle is the time to strengthen financial safeguards, not weaken them.
Click here to download a PDF version of the letter.
On November 19, 2018, AFR and 35 organizations sent a joint letter to the OCC urging the agency not to weaken the Community Reinvestment Act.
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