Category Archives: Blog Post

Blog: Yet Another Anti-ESG Congressional Hearing 

The recent congressional hearing on Wednesday, June 12th, about Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing, featured unfounded, culture war-laden antitrust claims that witnesses and minority leaders easily debunked. During the spectacle, some members of Congress targeted witnesses from a sustainability nonprofit (Ceres), a public pension fund providing retirement security to over two million workers (CalPERS), and an impact investor (Arjuna Capital). These witnesses and others provided reasoned defenses of responsible investing, highlighting its importance for long-term financial stability, risk-management, and climate resilience.

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Blog: Wall Street Lobby Surfaces New Nonsensical Legal Claim Over CFPB Funding

Last month the Supreme Court delivered a crushing defeat to Wall Street’s challenge to funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Undeterred, Wall Street is now trying to distort the Supreme Court’s decision to conjure up a new and utterly nonsensical argument about the legality of the CFPB’s funding. The trial balloon for this argument was launched in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by Hal Scott, a retired Harvard Law professor and longtime industry shill whose specialty is neither consumer nor constitutional issues but international finance. Scott’s notion has already been swatted down by several credentialed legal experts of various political stripes.

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Blog: CFPB Takes Action on Consumer Protection Violations in the Corporate Fine Print

When consumers purchase many financial products and services they have no say over specific terms and conditions, only the choice of whether to sign or not. Yet, hidden in the fine print in virtually every contract is another grave price consumers unwittingly pay: the removal of many of their legal rights and protections. If consumers want financial services, the fine print — and the proper regulation thereof — is critically important.

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Blog: Congress Should Heed Warnings from Today’s Exxon Shareholder Meeting

Today is Exxon’s annual shareholder meeting.  Regardless of the results of key votes, shareholders have made their voices heard by making it clear there will be consequences for corporations that, as the fossil fuels giant has, sue their own shareholders for daring to exercise their rights. Members of Congress should be listening too as they consider curtailing shareholder rights through H.R. 4655 and H.R. 4767 — bills marked up by the House Financial Services Committee that are expected to come to a floor vote this summer. 

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Blog: Sam Bankman Fried’s Sentencing is the Beginning, not the End of the Push for Crypto Accountability.

Today, Sam Bankman Fried – known as SBF, the founder of crypto firm FTX; the once exalted face of the crypto boom, and now the poster child for crypto scandals – was sentenced to serve 25 years in prison, after being found guilty of seven counts of fraud in a jury trial last year. The presiding judge found SBF, in addition to his other charges, had committed perjury and witness tampering during his trial as well.

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Blog Post: Bluelining: How Climate Change is Driving an Insurance Crisis

Financial institutions like insurers, banks, and mortgage lenders, might raise prices or simply withdraw from major markets they deem environmentally risky. If that sounds trivial, consider that in the case of property insurance we’re already seeing these exclusions cover entire states.

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