Private equity owns over a million U.S. apartment units. Tenants pay a price when corporate landlords buy their buildings. In some cases, private equity buyers have pushed out lower-income tenants – through rent hikes, eviction threats, and more – to flip buildings into high-rent properties to sell for big profits.
Wall Street private equity funds are continuing to snap up homes to pad their expanding portfolio of rental properties. Institutional investors own nearly a quarter million single-family rental homes. Wall Street landlords often hike rents, avoid repairs, gouge tenants with fees, and are more likely to evict tenants.
Ten years after the financial crisis, a majority of members of Congress have voted again and again for bills pushed by the bank lobby that are dangerous for our financial stability, undermine consumer and investor protections, and enable racial discrimination in lending. The report, entitled “Where They Stand on Financial Reform,” lays out how each lawmaker voted.
AFR released the policy brief linked below concerning the role of private equity in the Toys R’ Us bankruptcy and the importance of taking action to limit private equity predation on the businesses they own. The Toys R’ Us Bankruptcy And Private Equity Predation.
AFR released the document below to provide context on the Congressional testimony of Federal Reserve vice-chair for supervision Randy Quarles, and highlight several areas which we believe Congress should question him about. AFR Backgrounder on Quarles Testimony
A new report from Americans for Financial Reform and the Private Equity Stakeholder Project documents how the private equity industry has driven the growth — and abuses — of the for-profit higher education industry.
On the first anniversary of the Trump administration, the Take on Wall Street coalition catalogs the ways that Wall Street made bank on Trump in 2017.
The briefing paper linked below uses Penn-Wharton and IRS data to show how the financial sector is a big winner from the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, with almost $250 billion in tax benefits over the next decade flowing to financial firms
The slide presentation linked below documents AFR’s findings on the 2017 CCAR stress tests. AFR Assessing the 2017 Stress Tests A Medium blog post is also available here: https://medium.com/@RealBankReform/stress-tests-less-stressful-than-ever-fbe68b8e161a
“Community Banks Have Returned to Profitability: The percentage of community banks that are profitable has increased every year since 2009. For the year 2015, over 95% of the nation’s 5,880 community banks showed a profit. This is up from 78% in 2010, the year Dodd-Frank passed.”