Tag Archives: Wall Street

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Analysis: Antitrust and Banking Agencies Must Block Capital One-Discover Merger

The $35 billion takeover bid would vault Capital One into 6th place among the biggest U.S. banks and create the largest U.S. credit card lender, ahead of current leader JPMorgan Chase. This new company could raise prices for cardholders, especially lower-income consumers and Black and Latine households and give Capital One the power to jack up debit card fees on merchants. In short, it would reinforce the megabank monopoly power that is already a serious problem in the American economy. The Biden administration must stand up for consumers, communities, and small businesses and block the Capital One-Discover merger.

Letter to Regulators: Strong Basel Capital Standards Support Growth

The bank lobby is spending vast lobbying dollars to cloak themselves in the mantle of preserving access to credit. But the truth that the banks avoid debating is that the overwhelming impact of higher bank capital is – by design – to restrict how risky and how big the more speculative aspects of their business, notably their trading and investment bank operations can grow.

Letters to Regulators: Letter to Treasury, OCC, FRB and FDIC on the Need to Fight Bank Consolidation

The President has made it clear: it’s time to fight consolidation, not facilitate it. In reviewing lessons learned from this most recent banking crisis to better prevent the next one, the regulators must be full-throated and clear in their affirmation that robust regulation and competition, not consolidation, will lead to a healthier, safer, and more vibrant financial system. Banks must exist to serve the needs of the American people, not the other way around – and it is regulators’ critical task to ensure so. 

News Release: Famous Last Words – What the Bank CEOs Told Congress in 2018 to Get Deregulation

As the former CEOs of failed banks prepare to testify before Congress, consider the self-serving statements that bank executives, lobbyists and lawmakers uttered to grease passage of banking deregulation legislation in 2018. “SVB, like our mid-sized bank peers, does not present systemic risks,” Greg Becker, the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank insisted, about five years before federal authorities declared his bank a systemic risk.

Policy Memo: Federal Reserve Policy & Regulatory Changes Needed in Response to Bank Failures

The Federal Reserve’s deregulatory and light touch approach to regulation and supervision paved the way for the bank failures that have shaken the financial system this year and that led to extraordinary government intervention to preserve financial stability. Below we suggest a set of changes the Fed can make without Congressional action that would increase financial stability and put the welfare of the public ahead of the narrow interests of big banks and Wall Street.

Blog: Private Equity Can Kill: Help Us Fight Wall Street’s Deadly Power in Nursing Homes

Unbeknownst to most people with loved ones in nursing homes, it’s often nearly impossible to determine if the facility you’ve entrusted your family member to is owned by a private equity firm – an ownership structure that has been shown to result in worse health outcomes for patients, at greater cost. Within the past two decades, the once-obscure private equity industry has ballooned in size from $1 trillion in 2008 to nearly $4.5 trillion in 2021.