On Wednesday, Republican Congressional leaders and the Administration released their tax framework. “This ‘plan’ amounts to a package of tax cuts for Wall Street and the 1%” …
“[E]xecutives for both Wells Fargo and Equifax… will testify in Senate committees next week. Both companies have used arbitration clauses in an attempt to deny consumers access to the courts… ‘This rush toward a vote in the Senate is a cynical attempt to roll back an important consumer protection before anyone gets straight answers from Equifax and Wells Fargo about the damage they’ve done to the financial lives of millions of Americans,’ said Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform.”
This rush toward a vote in the Senate is a cynical attempt to roll back an important consumer protection before anyone gets straight answers from Equifax and Wells Fargo about the damage they’ve done to the financial lives of millions of Americans.
“A cadre of attorneys and policy advisers from the Obama administration is teaming up to do what they say Education Secretary Betsy DeVos seems incapable of doing: protecting students. ‘Rather than collaborating to get more relief to students who’ve fallen prey to industry scams, and to prevent future abuses, DeVos has chosen to make oversight more difficult and accountability harder to come by,’ said Alexis Goldstein, senior policy analyst at the progressive Americans for Financial Reform.”
Washington DC – On Tuesday, groups with the Take on Wall Street campaign made their voices heard outside a Senate Finance Committee hearing, opposing tax cuts for millionaires, billionaires, and wealthy corporations, and demanding that tax legislation focus on closing loopholes and making Wall Street
“No other piece of Dodd-Frank “mattered to Goldman quite like the Volcker Rule, which would protect banks’ solvency by limiting their freedom to make speculative trades with their own money. Unless Goldman could initiate what [AFR Policy Director Marcus] Stanley called the ‘complexity two-step’ — win a carve-out so a new rule wouldn’t interfere with legitimate business and then use that carve-out to render a rule toothless — Volcker would slam the door shut on the entire direction in which Blankfein and Cohn had taken Goldman.”
“The vote [came] during the debate over the Financial Services and General Government bill, which funds some basic functions of the federal government, including the Treasury Department… Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) introduced an amendment to take this language out of the appropriations bill and continue to allow the CFPB to regulate payday lenders as it regulates all financial services businesses. The amendment failed with four Republicans joining Ellison to protect borrowers and three Democrats choosing to side with payday predators.”
Retirement savers need the fiduciary rule, fully enforced, to help ensure they can enjoy a dignified retirement. See the story of Steve Wingate to learn what happens without this common-sense protection.
The Department of Labor should simply let the fiduciary rule, as written, take full effect. The effort to delay is nothing but an effort to buy time for creating a rationale to roll back the rule, and an abuse of a regulatory process set down in law. Enough.