AFR in the News Archives - Page 19 of 58 - Americans for Financial Reform

AFR in the News: Congressional Republicans using fear of a government shutdown to help big banks (Vox)

“Right now any bank over $50 billion dollars in size automatically becomes a SIFI [systematically important financial institution]. Richard Shelby, the [Senate Banking Committee] chair… originally called for raising that threshold to $500 billion. But Republicans also want to weaken the ability to designate non-banks as SIFIs. As Marcus Stanley of Americans for Financial Reform told me, ‘The FSOC designation procedure is already lengthy and time-consuming and includes numerous procedural protections for firms under consideration. These bills are designed to make it essentially unworkable.'”

AFR in the News: Corinthian students to receive $28 million in loan forgiveness (Washington Post)

“Alexis Goldstein, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform, says the department has done a poor job of reaching out to Corinthian students who might be eligible for relief… ‘[T]he department should be pursuing a much more comprehensive, multi-pronged outreach strategy in order to ensure that all students victimized by Corinthian are aware of their legal right to pursue debt cancellation.’”

AFR in the News: Dozens Of Democrats Are About To Vote For Racial Discrimination At Car Dealerships (Huffington Post)

“‘Car dealers and lenders are attacking the guidance because they do not want the CFPB to enforce antidiscrimination laws in car lending,’ the nonprofit group Americans for Financial Reform wrote in a September letter to lawmakers. ‘They have known for decades that car dealer markups lead to discriminatory lending, and they would prefer the CFPB ignore this particular injustice.'”

AFR in the News: Budget deal offers way to sneak through financial changes (USA Today)

“”The industry’s agenda is far-reaching,” [AFR’s Jim] Lardner wrote in U.S. News & World Report. ‘But the riders all share a common purpose: They would make it easier for banks and financial companies to exploit us, whether by cheating consumers, engaging in reckless bets or using taxpayer subsidies to generate windfall profits for a handful of giant institutions and a narrow financial elite.'”

AFR in the News: Democrat Eyeing McCain’s Senate Seat Moves From Pagan Socialist to Conservative Blue Dog (InsideSources)

“Lisa Donner, head of Americans for Financial Reform… dismissed the notion that Congress needs to re-debate the agency’s structure. ‘Each month that goes by, it’s easier to make the case that CFPB is doing its job,’ Donner said. ‘These questions have been asked and answered.’”

AFR in the News: House Dems Back Away from Effort to Turn CFPB Into a Commission (Huffington Post)

It’s “a form of agency leadership that has been shown again and again to produce weak regulation and enforcement at best, and partisan gridlock at worst,” said Jim Lardner of AFR. “The commission idea is being promoted by an alliance of financial industry lobbyists and lawmakers who have been out to undermine the Bureau’s effectiveness ever since they failed to block its creation.”

AFR in the News: Nobody wants to be known as the senator from Goldman Sachs (Financial Times)

AFR’s Marcus Stanley: “Why are we thinking that the [financial] industry and the industry lobby knows better than the regulators? To say that Dodd-Frank is some straitjacket ignores the [truth] that regulators have lots of chances to adjust [its implementation].”

AFR in the News: Is Regulation the Reason Liquidity Is So Unstable? (American Banker)

“Consumer groups are deeply skeptical of the debate, arguing it is just a talking point for the regional and big banks to weaken Dodd-Frank. ‘It’s basically an attempt to put up a sort of fog of complicated technical terms around industry’s desire to reverse pretty basic financial reforms,’ said Marcus Stanley, policy director for public advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform. There’s no academic consensus on any single best way to measure [liquidity] … so you can raise it as this boogeyman in a way that is not really particularly connected to the substantive issues.'”

AFR in the News: Did the Volcker rule really harm the bond market? (MarketWatch)

“Bonds seem to trade in smaller transaction sizes than they once did… That is perceived as a sign of illiquidity… A better indication, according to a presentation by Marcus Stanley, policy director of Americans for Financial Reform, would be total trading in the corporate market, which in fact has slightly increased since the financial crisis.”

AFR in the News: “Too Big to Fail” Is Still a Problem – Here’s How D.C. Wants to End It (National Journal)

“‘Fixing much of this could have been done 10 years ago by higher capital requirements, which we failed to do, but we need to move more in that direction,” [Sherrod] Brown, now the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said at a press conference this month with Americans for Financial Reform.'”