Americans for Financial Reform joined 56 other organizations to express strong support for the PROTECT Students Act. This legislation would enact important protections for students and taxpayers
against predatory colleges that cheat students and leave them with large debts they cannot afford.
It also includes a far-reaching set of reforms to hold predatory colleges accountable
to both students and taxpayers.
The financial cycle is a concept developed by economists to understand the reasons why finance-driven growth can be self-defeating. Policymakers need to rebalance our response to recessions and financial crises to prevent any repetition of the experience of 2008-2009, in which benefits flowed to Wall Street, not ordinary Americans.
New members of Congress demonstrated substantially less reliance on money from the financial services industry than incumbents who won re-election in 2018. First-term Democratic members of the House raised, on average, 17 percent of the money for their campaign committees from small donors, compared with 9.4 percent by Democratic incumbents who won re-election.
The replacement of the CEM by the SA-CCR would significantly reduce leverage capital requirements for bank derivatives positions, which we believe would cut total capital backing derivatives books at large banks.
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund applauds the news that a court has rejected the for-profit college industry’s attempt to stop the 2016 Borrower Defense rule. Today, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia sided with students over Betsy Devos’s attempts to let abusive for profit schools rip them off with impunity.
“A coalition of 50 public interest groups today sharply criticized the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s proposal to gut important consumer-protection rules, especially for fintech companies, arguing the agency does not have the authority to create potentially unlimited exemptions from the very regulations that the CFPB is obligated to enforce.”
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund joined with 61 other organizations to tell the Department of Education that we are closely monitoring their ongoing efforts to recklessly deregulate higher education. As 62 organizations and advocates for students, families, taxpayers, veterans and service members, we wrote
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund joined with 67 other organizations working on behalf of students, consumers, vets, servicemembers, civil rights, & college access to urder Education Secretary Betsy Devos not to eliminate the gainful employment rule, which serves to defend students from high-cost, low-return career ed
“The Proposed Rule is a brazen attempt to dismantle more than 20 years of borrowers’ rights to a defense to repayment on their loans when schools break the law. This dismantling will do nothing more than unleash a new wave of waste, fraud and abuse. This country teaches people that education is a path to a better life. For far too many years, allowing Title IV funds to flow to institutions engaging in fraud has turned this dream into a nightmare for their students. If the Department continues down this path of dismantling the right to a borrower defense, its legacy will be condemning students to lives full of poverty, while allowing executives of predatory proprietary institutions to become wealthy at their expense.”
