AFR joined forty four organizations in supporting the Department of Labor efforts to update and strengthen the protections that apply when individuals receive advice about their retirement investments.
AFR’s Policy Director, Dr. Marcus Stanley, provided testimony before the Senate Banking Committee during a hearing on the examining of small depository institutions.
Americans for Financial Reform, Gina Chon of the Financial Times reports, “will soon send a letter to the agencies – it will also be circulated among lawmakers – urging them to finalise the proposal and strengthen it by not leaving implementation up to a bank’s board or management.” The article quotes AFR’s Marcus Stanley, who describes the executive-compensation provision as “one of the major pieces of unfinished business in Dodd-Frank.”
In a joint editorial, Americans for Financial Reform and the Cato Institute criticize the Federal Reserve for not properly implementing new statutory limits on emergency lending programs, to prevent their use in future bank bailouts. “It is impossible to read the proposal and see how it limits Federal Reserve discretion,” say AFR’s Marcus Stanley and Cato’s Mark Calabria. “With the exception of a few actions aimed at single institutions, it appears that the actions taken in 2008, which so angered the public would still be feasible under the proposed rule.”
Nearly five years after the financial crisis, a new national poll – conducted on behalf of Americans for Financial Reform and the Center for Responsible Lending – shows continued bipartisan support for tougher regulation of the financial industry and its products and services. A sweeping majority of voters (78%) believe that financial rules and enforcement need to be strengthened, and that Wall Street’s bad practices have not changed enough.
Appearing before the House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Consumer Credit, AFR Policy Director Marcus Stanley criticized a set of bills that would undermine current consumer protections, weaken Wall Street reforms, and put roadblocks in the way of financial regulators.
The Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) is a crucial part of the Dodd-Frank Act, and was created in direct response to weaknesses in our system of financial regulatory oversight revealed by the 2008 financial crisis. Recently questions have been raised concerning FSOC’s powers to designate non-bank financial companies for oversight, and the level of transparency for Council activities. This document reviews the reasons for FSOC’s creation, gives a detailed breakout of the steps in the FSOC designation process, and discusses the issue of FSOC transparency.
AFR and other organizations have submitted letters and materials to members of Congress opposing HR 4413.
AFR has previously called on the SEC to strengthen its rules on credit ratings agencies. This proposal describes a method by which the SEC could change ratings agency incentives to prevent the kinds of large-scale misratings that helped trigger the financial crisis.
“One scam is to fire employees of the private equity firm and rehire them immediately as ‘consultants.’ The investors are responsible for consultants’ salaries, where private equity employees are paid out of their own pockets. Another is taking what most private equity investors believe to be part of management fees, things like legal and compliance costs, and billing their investors for them without the investors properly knowing it. A third is private equity firms lying about the valuation methods they use to tell investors about the returns they make each year. All of these are ways for private equity firms to take money from their investors for themselves.”