A coalition of 59 national and state organizations, led by the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC), National Association of Consumer Advocates (NACA), Consumers Union, Americans for Financial Reform, and the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) sent a letter to CFPB Director Richard Cordray urging the
Tapping into the strong anti-Wall Street sentiment, on July 13th, Representative DeFazio reintroduced his financial transaction tax legislation as the “Putting Main Street FIRST Act: Finish Irresponsible Reckless Speculative Trading Act.” The reintroduction of this bill comes with a fresh score from the Joint
“Americans for Financial Reform (“AFR”) appreciates this opportunity to comment on the above referenced Proposed Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (the “Proposal”) issued by the Federal Reserve, FDIC, FHFA, NCUA, OCC, and SEC (the “Agencies”)… Section 956 is a particularly significant and vital element of the Dodd-Frank Act. There is widespread agreement among students of the 2008 financial crisis that the design of bonus pay was a central contributor to the crisis. “
AFR and 4 other organizations call on the Department of Education to create a system that promotes quality and consistent student loan servicing by ensuring accountability, properly aligning servicer incentives, and creating appropriate standards.
“Thank you for introducing the Wage and Garnishment Equity Act of 2016 (WAGE Act), which would amend the Consumer Credit Protection Act to protect workers from excessive wage garnishment. “
AFR’s Alexis Goldstein gave opening remarks at the launch of the AFT Report “Regulating Too-Big-to-Fail Education.” In her remarks, Goldstein outlined the parallels between the for-profit college crisis and the subprime mortgage crisis.
A newly released paper urges regulators to make it easier for people with limited English proficiency (LEP) to understand and navigate the financial system, especially the mortgage loan market. A companion paper tells the stories of several LEP homeowners who belatedly discovered unfavorable mortgage terms and had great difficulty securing loan modifications.
“The undersigned organizations urge you to oppose H.R. 5112 or any similar bills that dramatically undermine the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) by eliminating its authority to prohibit abusive acts and practices and by imposing unworkable procedural requirements that would make it effectively impossible for the CFPB to write critical rules. “
“Under the terms of the CFPB’s proposal, consumers and companies would remain perfectly free to resolve disputes through arbitration, but it would be a voluntary act on both sides. What the CFPB is seeking to regulate is involuntary arbitration, dictated and controlled by banks and financial companies through take it-or-leave-it contracts with consumers. More specifically, its proposal would bar companies from compelling consumers to sign away the right to join forces to challenge a practice that injures many people at once.”
“To its considerable credit, Google has decided to stop running search ads for debt-trap payday loans. This decision, which follows a similar announcement by Facebook last year, closes off an important avenue of customer recruitment for an industry that is doing more and more of its business online. Payday loans, whether made through physical or virtual storefronts, are engineered to suck people into long-term triple-digit-interest debt, making their financial problems worse, not better.”