Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, black homeownership was already at historically low levels nationwide and the racial wealth gap was widening, leaving communities of color with far less wealth and fewer resources for emergencies. COVID-19 has been particularly devastating for African-Americans, low-income families, and immigrants, who are bearing the brunt of the resulting economic fallout as well.
The AFR Education Fund sent this letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission opposing new rules that would be ineffective in preventing speculation in energy and agricultural commodities. A pdf of the comment can be downloaded here: AFR Education Fund Comment on Position Limits Proposal
In place of a heartless free market of panicked investors who might want to cut their losses and sell, the plan is to simulate real buying and selling of financial products like mortgages and bonds with directed deployments of the Fed’s endless trillions. And they will be endless … Marcus Stanley of Americans for Financial Reform said, “The Fed’s perspective on this is, they want to create normalcy.” But what does “normal” mean in an economy that may be changed forever?
Private equity funds could access government assistance for their portfolio companies while avoiding any responsibility to repay any debt or obligations to the public purse. Private equity firms could also tap government aid to finance leveraged buyout purchases of additional companies, using public money to load target companies with debt and drain their assets while avoiding any responsibility for paying that debt back.
It’s crucial the new House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis start oversight work as soon as possible. By doing so, the Subcommittee can make recovery efforts more effective and guarantee that government agencies are good stewards of public money.
The Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) and Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) released a bipartisan poll today showing that Americans around the country and across partisan identities strongly support student debt reduction during the COVID-19 pandemic.
AFR and our partners sent a letter in support of including the Medical Debt Relief Act as part of future covid-19 relief.
The Fed must aggressively attempt to retain institutional credibility as a neutral actor in our economic order with regards to the distributional effects of its policies. It should not help finance a merger wave that leads to large-scale consolidation of companies which would have been healthy competitors but for temporary impacts of the current crisis.
Public advocates sent a letter to Congress in support of the Pandemic Anti-Monopoly Act, a proposal from Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to prevent big corporations and Wall Street investors from exploiting the pandemic to further consolidate their economic and political power.
Unless Congress and regulators act, private equity will shed its nonperforming assets and feast on new ones. J. Crew is the latest example.