AFR released recommendations for “Day One” policy actions by the Biden Administration in the areas of banking regulation, securities and markets regulation, and addressing systemic risk. These are actions that could be taken without a lengthy rulemaking and would make immediate progress toward a fairer
AFR released policy recommendations to strengthen consumer financial protections and work towards reversing the damage caused by systemic racism, and products and systems that amplify inequality.
Reproduced and linked below is an AFR Education Fund memo on issues around the design of a national public investment bank that would be a modernized successor to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Link to pdf document: Policy memo on public investment bank – working draft
Today, private equity controls some 8,000 companies in the United States, more than twice as many companies as are publicly traded on U.S. stock markets. Private equity firms manage more than $4 trillion in U.S. assets and now own companies that collectively employ nearly 9 million American workers.
Like many PE firms, Sun Capital Partners often buys up existing businesses, loots their assets, squeezes workers, decimates jobs through layoffs and bankruptcy, and threatens workers’ retirement benefits.
Kathleen Kraninger, the current director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told an audience of bankers at a November 2019 industry gathering that “you are really helping drive the agenda.” Unfortunately for the public and for consumer financial protection, the Kraninger agenda and the Wall Street lobby’s priorities are indeed all too similar, and that has proved true even during the COVID-19 pandemic and massive economic distress it has produced.
The federal tax code includes many tax breaks and loopholes that provide tremendous cash benefits to real estate investors, developers, and corporate landlords. Closing these loopholes would generate billions of dollars in revenue.
Sixteen charts showing the lasting impact of the financial crisis on family finances and inequality.
Private equity funds could access government assistance for their portfolio companies while avoiding any responsibility to repay any debt or obligations to the public purse. Private equity firms could also tap government aid to finance leveraged buyout purchases of additional companies, using public money to load target companies with debt and drain their assets while avoiding any responsibility for paying that debt back.
Preppy retailer cannot survive retail and coronavirus economic downturn saddled by private equity-imposed financial burdens.
Now, with 26 million workers unemployed and countless businesses closing indefinitely, private equity firms are salivating at the potential business opportunities that might arise from the expected economic fallout. Unless we take immediate action to prevent it, private equity firms will take advantage of this unprecedented crisis to make even greater asset grabs.
“Coronavirus distress is the ‘opportunity of the century’ for real estate investors,” according to a recent headline in The Real Deal, a New York real estate news publication. The article quotes Meridian Capital Group’s David Schechtman saying “But I will tell you, real-estate investors — when you take the emotion out of it — many of them have been waiting for this for a decade.”