As organizations that represent the interests of American workers, small businesses, and consumers we applaud Representative Jayapal on a bill that finally puts American workers and small businesses ahead of corporations. This is exactly the type of program we need to keep people on payroll and connected to their important health benefits, address our ballooning unemployment, and lay the foundations for economic recovery.
Hundreds of thousands of small businesses shuttered by COVID-19 are at risk of closing for good in the coming weeks without direct subsidies. Very small businesses and those with historically limited access to capital are especially vulnerable. With little or no revenue coming in, entire sectors of the small business economy face extinction. Tens of millions of jobs are at stake – along with health care, sick leave, retirement, and other important benefits.
A letter signed by 36 consumer, civil rights, community, housing, and other public interest organizations asking FHFA to prioritize providing in-language resources on COVID-19 relief options and outreach so that borrowers with limited English proficiency will be able to understand their options and access the help they need to weather this unprecedented public health crisis.
Today, under the cover of a national crisis, five federal bank regulators issued small dollar bank lending guidance that lacks the consumer protections needed to ensure loans do not trap borrowers in a cycle of debt.
The recommendations below are focused on direct relief for consumers and individuals with debt burdens, which should be in addition to other efforts to provide broader fiscal relief and to support small businesses.
This major crisis demands a massive and swift response, but it must focus first on health care, and then on easing the burdens on everyday people, communities, and small businesses who are hardest hit. The McConnell proposal falls far, far short of what the situation demands.
Apart from the obvious fact that this is a public health crisis and should be treated as such, we should all be immensely skeptical of any suggestion from Wall Street that it needs a bailout or any kind of assistance. We need to help people, not profits.
His career is marred by a record of supporting dangerous deregulatory policies that have left our financial system ill equipped to face the economic challenges it is now confronted by. This includes efforts to weaken the Volcker rule that will further damage the resiliency of major financial institutions and a housing policy that treats market deregulation as the solution to our nation’s housing affordability crisis.
“We are in a much more fragile situation than we should be because the regulators haven’t been on the job,” said Marcus Stanley, policy director for Americans for Financial Reform. “This is a real economic crisis we’re facing.”
The AFR Education Fund wrote a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission supporting the agency’s proposal to require anonymous trading of cleared derivatives on Swaps Execution Facilities. Revealing the identity of trading partners can prevent new competitors from entering these markets and bidding down