We stand in solidarity with the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and the millions of Black people subject to racial oppression, violence, and murder at the hands of the police and of white supremacists.
The Federal Reserve’s 2024 stress-test results, which found that Capital One’s credit card portfolio is increasingly vulnerable to macroeconomic swings that could undermine its financial viability, highlights why federal regulators should block its proposed merger with Discover.
Although the ALEC bill offers some form of consumer protection from civil suitsand collection agencies, it is really “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Christine Chen Zinner, senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit focused on consumer protection and an ethical financial system. “I like to think of these as workplace payday loans, because that’s really what they are, they are a loan,” Chen Zinner told The Lever. “There’s an expectation to be repaid, there’s a consequence if they aren’t repaid, so it’s really a loan.”
AFREF hosted a webinar to address the urgent need for regulations on incentive-based executive compensation. The discussion, led by Natalia Renta, focused on the importance of implementing Section 956 of the Dodd-Frank Act to protect consumers and the financial system. Insights from SEC Commissioner Lizárraga and experts from labor unions and advocacy organizations highlighted the ongoing risks and impacts of misaligned incentives.
The recent congressional hearing on Wednesday, June 12th, about Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing, featured unfounded, culture war-laden antitrust claims that witnesses and minority leaders easily debunked. During the spectacle, some members of Congress targeted witnesses from a sustainability nonprofit (Ceres), a public pension fund providing retirement security to over two million workers (CalPERS), and an impact investor (Arjuna Capital). These witnesses and others provided reasoned defenses of responsible investing, highlighting its importance for long-term financial stability, risk-management, and climate resilience.
The Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund said in an April 15 letter that the OCC is still too predisposed to approve deals, despite the focus on negative merger characteristics in the national bank regulator’s proposed policy statement. “The thematic flaw in the proposed policy statement is that its fundamental orientation is to approve mergers and not to evaluate merger applications,” the group said.
Christine Zinner, senior consumer policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform, suggested that the financial services industry is “really scraping the bottom of the barrel” with the latest arguments. “Wall Street and predatory lenders will never give up trying to stop the CFPB,” she said in a statement. “An agency devoted to fighting such powerful interests will never be home free.”
Americans for Financial Reform appreciates the opportunity to provide a Statement for the Record for the House Financial Services Committee Hearing on “The Semi-Annual Report of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.” In the thirteen years since its creation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has and continues to vigorously protect consumers, increase marketplace transparency, and end unfair business practices through impactful rulemakings and enforcement actions.
Last month the Supreme Court delivered a crushing defeat to Wall Street’s challenge to funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Undeterred, Wall Street is now trying to distort the Supreme Court’s decision to conjure up a new and utterly nonsensical argument about the legality of the CFPB’s funding. The trial balloon for this argument was launched in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by Hal Scott, a retired Harvard Law professor and longtime industry shill whose specialty is neither consumer nor constitutional issues but international finance. Scott’s notion has already been swatted down by several credentialed legal experts of various political stripes.
The proposal by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to eliminate medical debt on credit reports would, if fully implemented, curb harmful practices such as distorted credit reports and abusive debt collection. As part of a broader initiative to improve the credit reporting system, the CFPB has proposed a new rule that would stop credit reporting agencies from including medical debts and collection information on consumer credit reports, and prohibit the information from being considered in underwriting decisions. The CFPB is now seeking public comment on this consumer protection proposal.
For immediate release: June 11, 2024 Researchers Unveil Searchable Database of Top Private Equity Energy Portfolios For the first time, the Private Equity Climate Risks project has released a list of the energy holdings of 21 of the largest private equity firms globally, compiling their
