“Wall Street will face renewed scrutiny from the American public about the privileges it enjoys thanks to a political system that for far too long went along with what the industry wanted, no matter the costs to the rest of us,” said Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform.
“Blaming deposit insurance itself, however much the rescue of SVB depositors sticks in the craw, would be precisely the wrong reaction to this year’s crisis. The true injustice of the moment lies not in extending deposit insurance but in the paucity of obligations that bankers face in return,” AFR’s Communication Director, Carter Dougherty wrote.
“We have to think much more deeply as a society about how we view housing and whose interests are worth protecting the most,” [Caroline] Nagy, [senior policy analyst at AFR] said. “Looking at our tax and finance policy and seeing that we’re incentivizing the exact opposite is a very difficult, problematic place to be in.”
“They will say, ‘we have a good control on our risk,’ but you generate these returns somehow — these higher returns,” said Andrew Park, a senior policy analyst at the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform. “There is no free lunch on that.”
Alexa Philo, a former bank examiner for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform, said the Fed could adopt stricter rules on its own, without relying on Congress. “It is long past time to roll back the dangerous deregulation under the last administration to the greatest extent possible, and pay close attention to the largest banks so this crisis does not worsen,” she said.
“Despite its public statements to the contrary, Carlyle is a driving force behind climate change through its substantial financing of greenhouse gas emitting sectors,” said Oscar Valdés Viera, co-author and research manager at the Americans for Financial Reform education fund.
“Increasingly, in the past — especially after the pandemic — we’ve seen this big surge in parents who are interested in providing other activities for their kids that they weren’t able to previously do. And so, as a result of that, we’ve seen much more money from the private equity industry go into childcare,” said Andrew Park, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform.
“It’s a wake-up call,” Renita Marcellin, advocacy and legislative director for Americans for Financial Reform, a financial-reform group in Washington, D.C. told USA TODAY. “Congress should be thinking and starting to figure out how to repeal this law.”
“At the end of the day, what has been shown is that the explicit guarantee extended to the globally systemic banks is now extended to everyone,” said Renita Marcellin, legislative and advocacy director at Americans for Financial Reform. “We have this implicit guarantee for everyone, but not the rules and regulations that should be paired with these guarantees.”
In fact, says Carter Dougherty, the communications director of Americans for Financial Reform, the EU pushback against capital requirements is its own kind of subsidy.