“The biggest concerns that we see with the CFPB today is they are holding the hands of the payday lenders,” said Linda Jun, senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform. “That means that the debt trap will continue and people will continue to lose their cars and their bank accounts as a result of the continued destruction of payday loans.”
Following last month’s explosions at a petrochemical plant near Beaumont, Texas on the Gulf Coast, a new report draws attention to the private equity industry’s growing control of companies in this sector through a business model that may increase health, environmental, and safety risks. This financial engineering often allows private equity firms to extract wealth from the companies they purchase, but can result in intense pressure to cut costs, resulting in layoffs or reduced spending on operations that can lead to substandard products or services.
The day before Thanksgiving, a chemical plant operated by the TPC Group exploded in Port Neches, Texas spewing contaminants, forcing over 50,000 people to evacuate, and leaving the community with the lingering aftereffects of an industrial disaster. The TPC Group is owned by two private equity (PE) firms, SK Capital Partners (SK) and First Reserve. The private equity owned chemical plants in Texas held by SK Capital have a long record of environmental violations — not just the TPC Group factories but other SK Capital portfolio firms.
“They’ve made it easier to hide patterns of discrimination by raising the threshold for reporting, which makes it harder for civil rights lawyers or state attorneys general to draw conclusions when the data is not available,” said Linda Jun, senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit coalition. “So in addition to not going after any bad guys in two years, they are making it a lot harder to find those patterns of discrimination.”
The proposed rules weaken a compliance system that needs to be strengthened, introduce new loopholes and add confusion and inconsistency, all while failing to address the real changes needed to modernize CRA to respond to changes in our country’s demographics and changes in the structure of the banking industry.
Contrary to the mission of CRA, the FDIC/OCC proposal makes it easier for banks to ignore the variety of credit needs in the communities they serve, and leave them further behind.
We strongly oppose the proposal to remove requirements to post initial margin when engaging in inter-affiliate derivatives transactions with covered swaps entities. The Agencies instituted this requirement just four years ago, concluding that these margin postings were necessary to “protect the safety and soundness of the covered swap entity in the event of an affiliated counterparty default”. Since this issue affects the key depository affiliates of the largest U.S. banks – entities at the heart of the taxpayer-supported safety net for systemically critical banks – the 2015 Final Rule also concluded that failing to require initial margin for inter-affiliate swaps would pose a threat to broader systemic stability.
Support letter for the Protecting Your Credit Score Act of 2019
Under the rule, a borrower would have to sign a notice authorizing the lender to withdraw from the account after those two consecutive failures. “If I was smart, I would only sign that if there was money in there,” says Linda Jun, a policy counsel with Americans for Financial Reform, a regulatory and consumer protection coalition. “Aside from getting charged more for a negative balance, banks close bank accounts over this stuff, you could lose access to banking entirely.”
Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz: “[A] recent study by groups including Americans for Financial Reform found that private-equity bankruptcies in the retail industry alone cost 600,000 jobs. One of those laid off, Giovanna De La Rosa, told of her experiences in this publication. The best outcome would be fewer bankruptcies, but when they happen, the welfare of workers needs to be at the top of the list, not at the bottom.”