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
Next month, Joe Biden is going confront not only a terrible pandemic but also a pressing economic challenge. And this challenge is unfolding beyond Washington as the sum of thousands of smaller economic challenges being felt in statehouses, county seats, and city halls all across the country. Fortunately, there are tools at hand that President Biden can use. But he’ll have to be bold.
AFR released a recommended set of systemic reforms outlining steps to create a safe and just financial system. These include both reversing the deregulation of the Trump years and taking positive steps to create a far more secure and inclusive financial system. The full document
While it’s true that the largest banks currently look solvent in the face of economic stress, this is in significant part because they have benefited greatly from regulatory forbearance and from Federal Reserve intervention in financial markets. This report, based on analysis of regulations and bank financial reports by Americans for Financial Education Fund and Risky Finance, lays out some of the clearest ways in which the nation’s six largest banks have benefited from regulatory forbearance and the Federal Reserve’s financial market interventions.
On Oct. 19, AFR Executive Director Lisa Donner participated in a virtual conference organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Entitled “Empowering the public to assess large bank resiliency, the conference brought together leading experts to bank transparency to discuss how to maintain and improve transparency of the conditions of major banks.
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
The private equity industry, seeing a window of opportunity following the onset of the pandemic, has taken it upon itself to have the companies that it owns issue at least $10 billion in debt solely for the purpose of paying itself. This is yet another example of private equity looting.
A group of financial reform, labor, and public interest organizations today warned the Federal Reserve not to water down rules that limit the access of companies owned by private equity firms to emergency lending facilities created during the COVID-19 pandemic. Allies of the industry have pressed the Fed to loosen the affiliation rules for its new Main Street Lending Facility, a step that would ease the way for private equity to access public money despite its ready access to capital markets and uninvested capital.
“The failure to effectively control underwriting standards is one more example of ‘heads they win, tails we lose’ support for Wall Street.”
You can view or download the letter here.