FDIC Chair Jelena McWilliams “is doing the bidding of loan sharks who have a decades-long history of trying to get around state consumer protection rules,” Americans for Financial Reform spokesperson Carter Dougherty observed. “And now a federal regulator is helping them do it.”
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) introduced groundbreaking and essential legislation to repeal the deeply flawed Opportunity Zone tax break passed as part of the 2017 tax cut legislation. In addition to the basic problems with this tax break for the wealthy, multiple media exposés have already found that the rules have been bent to include parcels that benefitted high-rolling real estate investors, including those with ties to the Trump administration.
“I wasn’t sent here to safeguard and protect profit,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a video from the hearing circulated by Americans for Financial Reform, “I was sent here to safeguard and protect people.”
“This lobbyist is about the purest walking-and-talking evidence you could imagine of why money matters in Washington,” Linda Jun, senior policy counsel for Americans for Financial Reform
The survey found that voters across party lines both disapprove of common approaches of private equity firms in taking over and running existing businesses. They also approve of measures to increase accountability, close loopholes, and protect workers, investors and the viability of target firms.
Voters support continued reform of Wall Street, and that conviction extends to the private equity industry, according to a new poll by Lake Research Partners and Chesapeake Beach Consulting. Majorities of Democrats, independents, and Republicans, oppose the predatory tactics of private equity industry, and support legislative proposals aimed at correcting its abuses.
AFR and partners sent a letter in support of the Small Business Lending Fairness Act, which protects small businesses from predatory lenders by ensuring their ability to defend their businesses in the justice system by codifying the ban on confessions of judgments in consumer and small business loans.
Halloween is a fun time of year where we allow ourselves to be “scared” by haunted houses, ghosts and zombies. But there’s nothing fun about Zombie Debt — which is time-barred debt that is past the legal limit for which it can be collected. The
A video obtained by consumer watchdog groups Allied Progress and Americans for Financial Reform shows payday industry executives bluntly discussing how campaign contributions to the Trump campaign has bought them access to his administration. In a recent webinar, predatory lenders reveal their plan for using campaign cash to lock in a final CFPB payday rule that enriches them at consumers’ expense.
“We have here a striking example of how money in American politics leads to the abuse of consumers in the financial services marketplace,” said Linda Jun, senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform.