All posts by team

Blog: Cancel it Now: The Unconstitutional Nature of Student Debt 

We are well into the Biden administration and approaching a pivotal time in his Presidency where all hope could be lost on an issue I care a lot about: student debt. We are facing the possible flipping of Congress, student borrowers are in constant flux–unaware of when their loan servicers will be unleashed on them in the midst of a broken repayment system… and I’m afraid. I, like the rest of us, am still waiting for a portion of federal student debt to be canceled, one of Biden’s biggest campaign priorities. And despite the chatter of this announcement being forthcoming, we’re still on standby.

In The News: How the Fed’s inflation battle is already slamming the economy

Andrew Park, a senior policy analyst at the progressive Americans for Financial Reform, said a lot of companies also failed to take advantage of the debt binge during the pandemic to make productive investments, citing private equity-owned firms that borrowed money to pay dividends to shareholders. “When you have all this corporate debt that’s been issued, what happens is, it’s less of an immediate implosion and more of a drawn-out process where the debt becomes an amplifier” to any recession. That’s because people lose their jobs and income, which further dampens economic activity.

Cryptocurrency

Why Crypto is not the Solution to Financial Inclusion

Americans for Financial Reform and the Take on Wall Street campaign gathered several experts on July 1 to lay out the multiple ugly truths about crypto and addressed a few reasons why we should not take the promises made by its most enthusiastic advocates at face value, and why regulators need to use the authority they already have to oversee this market.

In The News: Bank lobbyists’ attacks on CFPB obscure the real ‘rogues’ (American Banker)

Polling [from Americans for Financial Reform] has consistently found that the public likes having a strong CFPB. It’s why banking lobbyists try to harp on images of government bureaucrats telling people what to do. But the public on the whole appreciates that the financial services industry is massive and powerful; it put nearly $3 billion into the 2020 elections, [according to AFR research].