“Dropping cases like this against Heights Finance, where a predatory lender was picking the pockets of working class people, signals that it’s okay to pick on the little guy,” Zinner said.
“Public pension funds are one of the biggest sources of capital for private equity firms,” says Oscar Valdés Viera, who analyzes private equity at Americans for Financial Reform. “Workers indirectly fund private equity’s predatory practices through their pension funds. The private equity billionaires benefit from tax loopholes and giveaways that the rest of us do not get,” he says, pointing out the carried interest tax deduction, which allows private equity managers to get much of their income taxed at the lower long-term capital gains tax rate than the ordinary income tax rate.
“People place a lot of value, besides economic value, on where they live, and a lot of people don’t have the resources to move anyway,” said Alex Martin, policy director at Climate and Finance at Americans for Financial Reform. “People aren’t able to afford the cost increases that are coming right now. And if they can’t do that, just raising rates continuously will not be a holistic solution.”
“All the defenders of the carried interest loophole are saying is that if you don’t let us get richer, we will not serve low-income communities, which is not an argument so much as it is extortion,” said Caroline Nagy, a housing policy specialist at Americans for Financial Reform.
Since its creation, the bureau has recovered over $21bn for defrauded consumers through enforcement actions against major financial institutions, including a $3.7bn order against Wells Fargo in 2022. There has been broad support for the agency, with a September poll from Americans for Financial Reform finding that 91% of voters believed it is important to regulate financial services to make sure they are fair for consumers – including 95% of Democrats and 87% of Republicans.
“Deemphasizing orderly resolution planning heightens the chances that floundering banks will be unprepared and more likely to fail,” said Patrick Woodall, managing director for policy at Americans for Financial Reform, a Washington-based coalition of consumer and investor advocates.”
Christine Chen Zinner, a senior lawyer at Americans for Financial Reform, a progressive advocacy group, called the consumer bureau’s attempt to overturn the settlement “bananacakes.” The appellate panel’s unanimous decision that the fair-lending law applied was a clear signal that the case had merit, she said.
As Christine Chen Zinner, a senior policy counsel at the nonprofit Americans for Financial Reform, pointed out in an interview, the agency has been politically under siege since its creation. “We have a bad feeling about the direction that it’s going,” she said. “This is an agency that was created after a devastating financial crisis because there were regulatory gaps.”
As climate-fueled disasters escalate, insurers are getting richer while leaving Americans in the lurch. Citing climate-related losses, many insurance companies are exorbitantly inflating rates, refusing to renew policies, and delaying, denying, or underpaying claims.
President Donald Trump’s energy secretary and two of his major donors won a key victory last week when the Securities and Exchange Commission moved to back off a rule requiring large companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and any plans to reduce them.