Category Archives: Financial Reform News

AFR/CRL Poll: Early State Voters Support Continued Reform of Wall Street

Americans see the need for tough enforcement of existing rules, even after hearing opposing arguments that stress a danger in the role of government. They strongly support the 2010 Dodd-Frank law that Congress passed in response to the financial crisis, as well as additional measures to fight continuing industry abuses.

In The News: Everything Is Private Equity Now (Bloomberg Businessweek)

Heather Slavkin Corzo, senior fellow at Americans for Financial Reform and director of capital market policies at the union federation AFL-CIO. “The massive growth of private equity over the past decade means that this industry’s influence, economic and political, has mushroomed,” she says. “It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that we are all stakeholders in private equity these days, one way or another.”

A horde of toy zombies demonstrates the way the CFPB's debt collection proposal could unleash harassing calls from debt collectors trying to collect on old, invalid, "zombie" debts

AFR/CRL Poll: CFPB Debt Collection Proposal Faces Strong Bipartisan Opposition

In its proposed rule, CFPB Director Kathy Kraninger is sanctioning consumer harassment by allowing debt collectors to: call consumers seven times per debt, per week; send unlimited emails, texts, and social media messages without consumer consent; allow debt collectors to collect very old “zombie debts” where the time to sue has expired; and file baseless lawsuits by making it easier to sue the wrong consumer, for the wrong amount.

Photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash

In the News: Turning Point for Student Loans (Inside Higher Ed)

This new data “confirms what advocates in the student borrower advocacy community have been saying for a long time: that student debt has hit crisis levels in the U.S.,” said Alexis Goldstein, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform.