In a House Financial Services Committee hearing from the beginning of March, both Representatives and witnesses discussed how Wall Street and private equity are causing housing prices to soar and driving inflation.
Wall Street’s private equity barons smashed previous records to complete $1.2 trillion worth of acquisitions in the United States in 2021, an all-time record. Globally, the industry gobbled up companies worth $2.1 trillion. The new acquisitions and the massive debts the industry generates is creating the risk of “the dotcom boom meeting with the financial crisis,” according to one insider.
A new Government Accountability Office report confirms several conclusions in AFR’s initial analysis of the Opportunity Zones program.
Lordstown Motors was supposed to be a promising electric vehicle startup backed by General Motors that would help revolutionize low-emissions vehicles while also revitalizing America’s “Rust Belt”. Instead, many of its promises, exploiting the loopholes in the SPAC model, were soon found to be untrue, reiterating the important changes that need to be made to the business model of companies taken public through SPACs.
In the discourse surrounding student debt cancellation, some pundits and lawmakers have consistently missed the mark on the benefits this policy will bring. Too many have ignored the very serious ways that student debt is a disproportionate burden on women borrowers, and Black women with student debt in particular.
Sen. Warren and Rep. Jayapal’s Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act of 2021 could not be a more timely reminder that the United States needs serious policy changes to address massive wealth and income inequality. Wall Street is the second-largest source of billionaire wealth, after the technology industry. While 8 million Americans slipped into poverty and half a million lives were lost to COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic — all with a disproportionately large impact on communities of color — the wealth of U.S. billionaires almost doubled, up $1.3 trillion.
The billionaires and millionaires of Wall Street deploy so much money to influence American politics and society that we can easily lose track of how pervasive it is. They spread money around to campaigns, think tanks, and lobbyists. Wealthy executives finance universities, cultural institutions, and hospitals. And this historical moment has laid bare for all to see that Wall Street also finances a virulently anti-democratic strain in American politics, one that always takes aim at people of color.
Private equity giant Apollo Global in 2019 lent large sums of money to trucking company YRC Worldwide. After Apollo’s executives reached out to the White House on getting bailouts in the spring, YRC managed, under mysterious circumstances, to be the greatest beneficiary of a special loan program for companies critical to national security.
The folk legend Robin Hood was, as every child knows, the legendary outlaw who robbed from the rich to give to the poor. But in a reincarnation of a long-running Wall Street scheme, it is the wily financiers who rob from the ordinary folk holding investment accounts at Robinhood.
Wall Street is pumping tremendous sums of money into the 2020 elections, and there are some notable trends regarding who is getting the money and who, within the financial services industry, is contributing this cycle. At the presidential level, Wall Street is splitting its contributions close to evenly, or maybe slightly favoring Biden over Trump. At the same time, it is fairly clear that Wall Street is investing in keeping the Senate in Republican hands.