All posts by team

Letter to Regulators: Letter Calling on Regulators to Halt Bank Mergers

AFREF led a letter to regulators stating that the laissez-faire stance adopted by the Department of Justice and the federal bank regulators and current merger guidelines have hurt small businesses, community banks, and households, especially those in BIPOC communities. The letter urges regulators to temporarily halt consideration of pending bank mergers until the DOJ and banking agencies adopt a plan that strengthens the guidelines to protect consumers.

News Release: Americans for Financial Reform Welcomes the FDIC’s Action on Reviewing Bank Mergers

Americans for Financial Reform welcomes the FDIC’s action on reviewing bank mergers. In the last 15 years, the federal bank regulators have rubber-stamped merger applications. This has led to unprecedented consolidation in the industry which has hurt consumers and small businesses, in the form of bank deserts and decreased lending to small businesses while lining the pockets of the banking executives. We look forward to commenting on ways to strengthen the bank merger guidelines to protect the interest of the communities they are supposed to serve.

Event: The Hidden Racism of the Tax Code: a Fireside Chat with Dr. Dorothy A. Brown & Dr. Darrick Hamilton

The Take on Wall Street campaign of Americans for Financial Reform hosted a virtual fireside chat with Dr. Dorothy A. Brown, Professor of Law at Emory University and author of The Whiteness of Wealth and Dr. Darrick Hamilton, director of the Institute for the Study of Race, Power and Political Economy at The New School, to discuss the white supremacy inherent in our tax code and how American tax policies impoverish Black Americans while enriching white Americans, and how we can restructure our system to focus on justice and equity.

A pair of hands writing on paper with a pen

Letters to Regulators: Memo to ED Supporting Continuity of Education From Carceral Setting to Reentry In Regulations on Pell Grants for Prison Education Programs

AFREF joined a memo to ED establishing their obligation to support education in reentry as Pell has been reinstated for incarcerated individuals and more individuals who will now begin a postsecondary education inside will not finish their degree within the correctional setting and will instead have to finish during reentry. The paper also demonstrates the types of support Prison Education Programs (PEP) could provide to help with the ‘education continuum’ from college inside to education outside.

sign for the CFPB outside a building

News Release: CFPB Overdraft Study is a Start but New Regulations Needed

We appreciate the work of the CFPB on drawing attention to the harms of overdraft fees, which take billions of dollars a year out of the pockets of mostly low- and moderate-income households to pad the bottom lines of the country’s big and small banks. And among those households, Black and Latinx households were also far more likely to incur overdrafts. We urge the CFPB to use all the tools that Congress gave it to protect consumers from abuses, including drafting tough new regulations.