“The GENIUS Act is an important step, but it is just one of many actions that the crypto industry and its allies in the White House and Capitol Hill are taking to launch an uncontrolled experiment in unleashing crypto on the economy and the financial system,” Mark Hays, an associate director of crypto and fintech at Americans for Financial Reform, a Washington-based advocacy group, told me.
Patrick Woodall, managing director for policy at Americans for Financial Reform, said slashing the research office would cut off “unique modeling and monitoring tools” that are critical to understanding where risk is building up in the financial system, from banks, private credit or other corners of the market.
The rhetoric is about “tightening our belts and austerity, but the reality is that the impact is not mostly budgetary,” he said. “The impact is overwhelmingly about our ability to actually monitor the financial system for growing risk that poses potentially very serious impacts on the economy.”
“If (stablecoin issuers) have to move those Treasuries quickly, or the market demands that, it could create some credit crunches there,” said Mark Hays, associate director for cryptocurrency and financial technology at Americans for Financial Reform. Hays said this assumes that stablecoins become more widely used after legislation passes.
Congress, its eye on a futuristic form of finance, is debating legislation that would legitimize stablecoins, a specific type of cryptocurrency linked to the U.S. dollar. But lawmakers eager to do the bidding of this new industry are ignoring the transformation of the American regulatory system and allegations of corruption in the second Trump administration.
The Consumer Federation of America, Americans for Financial Reform, Public Citizen and U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) called on the nation’s insurance firms to stop underwriting oil and gas projects, along with investing in fossil-fuel companies. The groups say backing fossil-fuel companies causes consumers’ insurance premiums to grow annually.
Progressive groups, including Indivisible and Americans for Financial Reform, have been circulating petitions in opposition to the bill, and a new organization called Democracy Defenders Action, led by former White House counsel Norm Eisen, is warning senators to vote no.
“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.