Our rent affordability crisis has hit people of color particularly hard. Nationally, over half of Black and Latinx households rent their homes, compared to just 28 percent of white households. Forty percent of homeless Americans are Black, compared to 13 percent of the U.S. population.
Washington, D.C. – The record Consumer Financial Protection Bureau settlement with Wells Fargo over widespread wrongdoing in providing auto loans, mortgages, and deposit accounts represents an opportunity for all federal regulators to force durable change at the oft-penalized megabank.
AFREF led comments to the Federal Insurance Office in support of their proposed “Climate-Related Financial Risk Data Collection” from insurers. AFREF supports this data collection because the increasingly prevalent and severe weather hazards caused by climate change pose a massive threat to the housing stability, affordability, and safety of Americans nationwide. Purchasing insurance policies is one of the few actions individuals can take to protect their property from the effects of climate-driven natural disasters. Therefore, the cost and availability of insurance is deeply related to a household’s monthly housing costs and their ability to recover from damages following severe weather.
“The fact that there were no commitments for the vehicles to be union-made is a glaring omission for an administration that prides itself on being union friendly,” said Porter McConnell, campaign director of the consumer rights group Take on Wall Street and co-founder of the Save the Post Office Coalition. “We will be looking to future announcements committing to the Oshkosh and the commercial off-the-shelf vehicles being union-made, which we know is entirely feasible.”
AFREF joined partners in submitting comments to the CFPB in response to their initiative to enhance public data on auto lending.
For private equity firms, said Andrew Park, a policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform, “it’s heads I win, tails you lose.”
AFR and Demand Progress led a group of consumer advocates and public interest organizations to send this letter to Congress, asking Members to take a more deliberative and systemic approach to advancing policies to regulate digital assets. The letter urged Congress to resist pursuing legislative proposals compromised by crypto industry influence or that do not adequately address the systemic problems found within the digital asset industry. Instead, the signers called on Congress to empower financial regulators to use their existing authorities and prioritize consumer and investor protection over the digital asset industry’s largely unproven promises.
Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island today warned that a recent court decision in the Fifth Circuit, though aimed at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, also threatens the funding stream of the Federal Reserve that underpins its independence from politics.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Private equity billionaires would be among the big winners from a corporate lobbying push in Congress to reap a windfall from a retroactive tax break in the omnibus bill now being crafted. Lobbyists and their many allies in Congress are trying to repeal new restrictions that took effect this year that limit how much corporations can deduct in interest payments on their debt.
A corporate tax break that could give some of Wall Street’s wealthiest people a $200 billion gift over ten years is under consideration as part of the omnibus budget negotiations underway in Congress this month. At issue are provisions of the 2017 Trump tax bill that took effect this year, and the private equity’s lobbying effort to overturn the parts of the law that limit a key tax break.