Building Power with Popular Education
Popular education is essential to building an equitable future — especially for base-building organizations.
Popular education is essential to building an equitable future — especially for base-building organizations.
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund wrote the Fed to express concerns over the blow-up of the Archegos family fund. This incident reveals both the dangers of excessive leverage at private funds, and the failure of banking regulators, including the Federal Reserve, to properly regulate bank interactions with such funds. To address these issues, the Federal Reserve must investigate its own regulatory failures in this case and publicly disclose the lessons learned from this investigation, and must also work with the Financial Stability Oversight Council to address the risks of excessive leverage at private funds.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced the appointment of John Morton as Climate Counselor at the Department. In March, Public Citizen and Americans for Financial Reform issued a blueprint for using financial regulatory tools in response to the climate crisis: Climate
Today, over 415 organizations sent an updated letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, calling on them to use executive authority to cancel federal student debt immediately. In the letter, the 416 advocacy groups highlight that cancelling student debt would stimulate the economy, help reduce racial wealth gaps, and could have a positive impact on health outcomes.
400 organizations signed a letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, calling on them to use executive authority to cancel federal student debt immediately. The letter, first sent in November and then again in January, has been updated with more than 70 additional signers.
In the wake of market volatility stemming from Archegos Capital, AFR wrote to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), urging action to improve transparency with enhanced 13F disclosures and investigate any regulatory gaps created by the registration exemption for large family offices. You can find
While it’s encouraging to see the Department act to protect over one million defaulted borrowers from seized tax refunds and wage garnishment, they must not leave behind the 5.5 million commercial FFEL borrowers who aren’t in default. An estimated 9 million borrowers total have been left out of the federal student loan suspension through no fault of their own. There is bipartisan support for ensuring no federal student loan borrowers areunfairly left behind; the Department must use its authority to protect all federal student loan borrowers.
The Department of Education’s actions today halt harms to borrowers that should never have happened. The Department must act next to affirmatively improve borrowers’ realities. The Trump administration, through executive action, made Total and Permanent Disability discharges automatically available to eligible veterans unless they opted-out. The Biden Administration must similarly act to make TPD discharges automatic for the estimated 400,000 borrowers eligible for relief who have not yet received it.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: MARCH 18, 2021 Contact: Alexis Goldstein, alexis@ourfinancialsecurity.org Statement of Alexis Goldstein, Senior Policy Analyst, Americans for Financial Reform: It is good to see the Department of Education finally take significant steps to fulfill the promise then-Secretary Arne Duncan made in 2015, that
On Feb 25, more than 145 organizations from across the United States sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, encouraging her to follow through on her promise to create a robust, well-staffed climate hub at Treasury led by a very senior-level person devoted full-time to climate.