“’Quarterly disclosures are very important. A lot can happen in six months, and it’s just not appropriate to reduce disclosures,’ said Marcus Stanley, the policy director for Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of foundations, unions and public interest groups that pushes for stronger financial regulation. ‘It’s just going to advantage insiders further.’”
“’We commend Senator Reed and his fellow senators for their leadership in protecting service members from abusive predatory lenders. Financial distress continues to be a leading factor that contributes to a lack of combat readiness and family stability for our men and women in uniform,’ said José Alcoff, payday campaign manager at Americans for Financial Reform. ‘Families and service members rely on the Consumer Bureau to ensure lenders comply with the law, and are caught if they target service members with debt trap loans.’”
“The proposed Borrower Defense rule sacrifices students’ rights in order to line the pockets of executives at for-profit colleges, an industry that has shown time and again that it will use taxpayer dollars to deceive and defraud its own students.” said Alexis Goldstein, AFR’s Senior Policy Analyst. “With this rule and its extreme and absurd barriers to relief, Devos effectively tells students that if a school scams them, they’re on their own.”
Click on the announcement below to see the details of AFR’s July 24th event marking the tenth anniversary of the financial crisis, and to RSVP Regulating Wall Street Ten Years Later July 24th Save The Date
“The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs meets today to conduct hearings on a set of bills ostensibly designed to increase access to capital. Several of these bills are part of a dangerous agenda to rollback securities markets regulations. The deregulation of private capital markets contemplated in these bills would disproportionately affect small, retail investors vis-à-vis large investors and would undermine the effective regulations and investor protections that are fundamental principles of stable and enlarging U.S. public capital markets. “
Stress tests are forecasts based on models. They stand or fall on the approach of regulators, whose assumptions can seriously underestimate bank losses. Before the 2008 financial crisis regulatory models also showed Wall Street was safe, but that turned out to be fantasy.
“‘When lawmakers vote for banking deregulation even though banks are raking in record profits, it exposes what is really at work,’ said Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform. ‘The bank lobby has flooded the political system with money, and is getting a return on its
investment. The result is legislation that makes the financial system less safe and less fair, and puts consumers at greater risk of abuse.’”
“‘The proposal ‘is an attempt to unravel fundamental elements of the response to the 2008 financial crisis, when banks financed their gambling with taxpayer-insured deposits,’ Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, said in a statement. ‘If implemented, these proposals could turn the Volcker Rule into a dead letter.'”
“’What is critical is that simplification not undermine the core principle at stake — that taxpayer-supported banking groups, of any size, not participate in proprietary trading at odds with the basic public and customers’ interests,’ Paul Volcker said in a statement…
‘This proposal is no minor set of technical tweaks to the Volcker Rule, but an attempt to unravel fundamental elements of the response to the 2008 financial crisis, when banks financed their gambling with taxpayer-insured deposits,’ said Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform.”