“When these financial predators come after them, I feel ashamed for the rest of us,” Sen. Warren tells former Rep. Patrick Murphy. She goes on to praise the Defense Department’s new Military Lending Act rules, the CFPB’s Office of Servicemember Affairs, and (responding to a comment by Murphy) Americans for Financial Reform. “Yes, they’ve been terrific.”
“There are really two elements to this story,” Marcus Stanley of Americans for Finance Reform said. “One is the internal Federal Reserve self-evaluation… that did say that Federal Reserve supervisors tended to be overly deferential to the banks that they supervise [and] tended to be reluctant to take action and reluctant to raise strong criticisms. And then… you get these tapes made by Carmen Segarra which appear to show this exact sort of deferential behavior.”
“This rule is not a cure-all or a magic bullet,” says Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform. “It’s relevant information for investors about how a company works. This disclosure is one piece of the puzzle, but it’s useful to have public and standard — or relatively standard — information.”
“Marcus Stanley, policy director for Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition including the AFL-CIO labor federation, said the decision should bolster the agency’s efforts to curb recent steps by Wall Street to escape Dodd-Frank by shifting their overseas trading operations. ‘I really hope that this decision is going to stiffen the CFTC’s backbone,’ Stanley said in a phone interview.”
Although the GOP is eager to expose the Fed’s dealings with big banks, it is equally anxious to dole out favors to financial operators… One deregulation bill, H.R. 5405, would exempt a significant swath of the market for derivatives — the complex financial products at the heart of the 2008 meltdown — from Dodd-Frank’s new trading rules. Americans for Financial Reform, the leading voice for Wall Street accountability on Capitol Hill, came out strong against H.R. 5405 and the other deregulation bill, H.R. 5461.
“’This is a really important rule,’” said Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform. ‘Margin is the first line of defense in the derivatives market.’ The regulators made the changes to bring American margin rules in line with new international ones approved in 2013, and in response to public comments.
“’While it has taken us some time to get to this point, today’s action does represent significant progress,’ Thomas J. Curry, the comptroller of the currency, said in a statement.”
“Banks are pressing U.S. policy makers for a multiyear delay of a rule requiring them to sell investments in private-equity and venture-capital funds…,” the Journal reports. The article goes on to cite critics of the calls for delay, including AFR’s Marcus Stanley. “This is supposed to be a regulatory option in special circumstances,” he told the Journal. “It’s not supposed to be an automatic permission for every bank to get a 12-year period after passage of Dodd-Frank to divest from venture funds.”
The financial industry has “spent more than $800 million on contributions to campaigns and on federal lobbying so far this election cycle,” PoliticoPro reports, citing AFR’s new report, “Wall Street Money in Washington,” which draws on data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. The report, as the paywalled story goes on to say, “found the financial sector has contributed $245 million to political campaigns, as of June 30, and spent nearly $560 million on lobbying through March.”
“This past year has seen significant advances on key issues of financial reform,” Mike Konczal writes in The New Republic, and “the issues where regulators are reluctant to take strong action are becoming increasingly apparent.” His article goes on to quote AFR Policy Director Marcus Stanley on the failure to “ban incentive pay that encourages inappropriate risk-taking, impose appropriate limits on the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending powers, bring real accountability to the credit rating agencies, and simplify the structure of global Wall Street mega-banks to ensure that they can be resolved safely.”
“Nearly four out of five voters surveyed (78%) said financial rules and enforcement need to be strengthened, and that Wall Street’s bad practices have not changed enough,” writes David Weidner of the Wall Street Journal, citing a new poll conducted by Lake Research for Americans for Financial Reform and the Center for Responsible Lending. “And the furor overrides the political divide we’ve been hearing so much about. The poll found 84% of Dmocrats, 82% of Independents and 74% of Republicans say they are concerned about the influence of Wall Street financial companies on elected officials.”