“‘This is one more reminder that it is crucial that people who lead these agencies are people strongly committed to reform and who will be as aggressive as they need to be despite pressure from the other side to slow down or weaken rules,’ said [AFR executive director Lisa] Donner.”
“Banking specialists who favor more stringent Wall Street rules expressed some concerns… ‘A derivatives exposure that looks small in normal times can become enormous in times of financial stress,” said Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform. “This rule may not contain adequate protections against that kind of risk.’”
“”The DNC chair describes Florida’s state law as a “model” for payday loan legislation. The director of the Campaign to Stop the Debt Trap at Americans for Financial Reform says otherwise, calling Florida’s law ‘a sham’ and pointing out that ‘it was backed by the industry.’”
“There’s also a case to be made for the limits of cost-benefit analysis in general, as it tends to undercount benefits even when used in realms for which it’s better suited. What’s more, empowering OIRA to directly intervene in financial regulations could overwhelm the tiny office. As Americans for Financial Reform notes, OIRA “has only 50 employees, as opposed to tens of thousands of employees at the various [financial] regulatory agencies” and “lacks substantive expertise in financial matters.”
“The department must move quickly to discharge the debt of all Corinthian students,” said Alexis Goldstein, senior policy analyst at the progressive Americans for Financial Reform. “Hundreds of thousands of borrowers from Corinthian remain on the hook for federal student loans. … despite the fact that the illegal actions identified in department enforcement actions were endemic throughout the entire chain.”
“Hedge funds were major traffickers in the toxic securities that brought down the financial system eight years ago. Because many of them now market aggressively to pension funds and institutional investors, ordinary retirement savers can lose big when hedge funds fail to generate returns extravagant enough to justify their extravagant charges. More and more of these funds use stealth tactics to build up potent but undetected market positions, enabling them to aggressively bring about the results they’re seeking — results that serve their interests at the consistent expense of workers, communities, and the wider society.”
“Cutting these big banks down to size would have a lot of positive impacts. It would lessen the political power of the financial industry, it would put government in a position [to] let a bank fail and let that bank be restructured to be a healthy entity and experience the consequence of its actions… There’s enormous amounts of money at stake and very complex and technical rules. The banks can fund a constant lobbying presence to hammer on all of these rules when often the general public might not even know these battles are going on, so it is a tough fight but I believe the public is on the side of stronger action.” — Marcus Stanley, Policy Director, Americans for Financial Reform
“Eight years after the start of the Great Recession, and seven years since the Troubled Asset Relief Program was implemented, the anger at major financial institutions has only grown — in both parties…In 2013, a Reuters-Ipsos poll of more than 1,400 Americans found that just 22 percent approved of TARP — years after the banks had been stabilized. Last year, when Lake Research Partners polled on behalf of the progressive Americans for Financial Reform, it found 70 percent agreeing with the statement that ‘most people on Wall Street would be willing to break the law if they believed they could make a lot of money and get away with it.'”
“I think you need an all-of-the-above approach: you use the law that bears Barney Frank’s name, which requires the breakup of any bank that is too big to fail without harming the economy; you pass new legislation, the 21st Century Glass Steagall Act, which is a bipartisan piece of legislation – Senator Warren’s on it, and Senator McCain is on it. And then you need to involve the public and the grass roots in order to build this new voice that’s going to hold these people accountable.” — AFR’s Alexis Goldstein
“’Wall Street and the financial industry were pushing once again for major rollbacks of financial regulation, and to block consumer and investor rights,” said [AFR Executive Director] Lisa Donner… ‘And on this they failed this time, and the rest of us won.’”