Today, 29 groups called on federal bank regulators to finally draft a plan to strengthen the merger guidelines to mitigate the adverse effects of bank consolidation, which include increased evictions, higher rates of debt collection, and decreased access to credit for consumers and businesses.
The federal authorities should halt all bank merger approvals until they strengthen the outdated guidelines that govern whether financial institutions can combine, according to a letter delivered today by 30 public interest organizations.
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund submitted a comment letter asking the Department of Justice to protect the public interest from ever larger banks exercising market power to impose higher costs on consumers, reduce the volume or quality of banking services, and from becoming so large that they pose a risk to the entire financial system and real economy.
Today, the Justice Department released a new approach to bank merger enforcement that brings the woefully outdated bank merger guidelines into the 21st century. The Justice Department announced that it would apply the greatly improved overall merger guidelines, which were released in 2023, to bank mergers as well. The bank merger rules that are currently in place date from the era of dial-up modems and are totally insufficient to address the complex market power issues posed by many proposed bank mergers — including the pending Capital One-Discover merger.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – A coalition of 30 community, consumer, civil rights, and public interest groups has called on federal bank and antitrust regulators to follow several critical procedural safeguards that will help ensure proper review of the proposed takeover of Discover by Capital One. The coalition includes Americans for Financial Reform, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, the American Economic Liberties Project and Public Citizen.
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.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The proposed Capital One purchase of Discover Financial Services threatens to raise credit card prices for consumers and further constrain credit access for communities around the country. Banking regulators and antitrust authorities must closely scrutinize this megamerger for the anticompetitive and anticonsumer impacts that would certainly justify blocking this takeover.
Washington, D.C. – The minor changes proposed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to the bank merger review process fail to grapple with the harms of consolidation and are no substitute for a thorough rethinking of merger guidelines that have remained unchanged for the last three decades.
Today, our Senior Policy Analyst, Alexa Philo, testified before the U.S. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Subcommittee on Economic Policy titled “Bank Mergers and the Economic Impacts of Consolidation.”
AFR’s Senior Policy Analyst, Alexa Philo, testified Before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Subcommittee on economic policy.