AFR

Wall Street private equity funds are continuing to snap up homes to pad their expanding portfolio of rental properties. Institutional investors own nearly a quarter million single-family rental homes. Wall Street landlords often hike rents, avoid repairs, gouge tenants with fees, and are more likely to evict tenants.

Big banks have lobbied for and won massive tax breaks and increased deregulation at a time when they are already making record profits. Ordinary Americans are getting a less safe financial system, and one that is an ever-more-powerful driver of inequality and economic vulnerability. Wall Street CEOs need to be held accountable for abuses by the institutions they run, and the dangerous policies they are pushing, both openly and quietly

Over the past two years, we’ve seen a lot of handouts to Wall Street but very little change for the better. Big banks got a massive tax cut and deregulation legislation right at the time they were making record profits. Ordinary Americans got a financial system that is less safe than it used to be, one that is an ever-more-powerful driver of inequality and economic vulnerability.

Corporate lobbyists have put together a set of plans aimed at making it easier for executives to serve nothing but their own narrow self-interests without any scrutiny, eliminating accountability to the shareholders who actually own the company.

In a new NYTimes magazine profile of Mick Mulvaney’s tenure at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Lisa Donner, head of Americans for Financial Reform, says “The bureau was constructed really deliberately to protect ordinary people. He’s taken it apart — dismantled it, piece by piece, brick by brick.”

In just a few months the current economic expansion will be the longest on record. But an increasing number of economists are predicting that it might be nearing its end. In preparing for an eventual economic downturn, what should be done to avoid the policy mistakes that made the 2008-2010 recession so devastating?

The requirement in the Dodd-Frank Act that major dealers in financial derivatives be regulated as such, and meet risk management and business conduct standards, is a direct response to derivatives market abuses that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. The loophole created by today’s Final Rule could permit large-scale evasion of this requirement.

Washington, DC – The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has proposed delaying when payday lenders would need to comply with a 2017 rule on predatory payday lenders by 15 months. This would allow the industry …