“This is an example of corporate monopoly power. They exert a certain price — really, any price that they want — and the parents are at the corporations’ mercy to pay that price,” said Christine Chen Zinner, senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform, a pro-consumer advocacy group. “They have no choices.”
Christine Chen Zinner, senior policy counsel for the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform, said communities of color often have the highest medical debt rates for many reasons. “Black and Latine families are more likely to have jobs without access to health insurance, and so that would drive up medical debt,” Zinner explained. “There’s also been disparate health treatments for these communities.”
“Despite the industry’s rhetoric around this, the shift in position from policymakers in Congress and other parts of Washington is not based on the substance of the industry’s policy arguments,” said Mark Hays, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit advocating for financial reform, and Demand Progress, a nonprofit progressive advocacy group. “The industry likes to say that this is true proof that there’s a so-called crypto voter, that crypto is a major election outcome or a major election issue. But I just feel like it’s sort of the same old pay-to-play Washington politics,” Hays added.
More opposition came from Patrick Woodall, managing director for policy at Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit coalition consisting of more than 200 consumer, civil rights, labor, business and investor organizations. “It would be irresponsible for the regulators to approve this merger after Capital One has repeatedly broken its promises made to secure previous mergers,” Woodall said. “It shut down two-thirds of its branches after promising to maintain its geographic footprint. It stopped making home purchase and home improvement mortgages after promising to maintain service levels.”
Christine Zinner, policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform, said the paycheck advance products “are nothing more than workplace payday loans, with consumers (being) more easily preyed upon since the money is only a tap away on a cell phone.” “People can easily become trapped in a cycle of debt by re-borrowing, requesting advances 12 to 120 times each year, just to pay basic household expenses and make ends meet,” she said.
Although the ALEC bill offers some form of consumer protection from civil suits and collection agencies, it is really “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Christine Chen Zinner, senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit focused on consumer protection and an ethical financial system. “I like to think of these as workplace payday loans, because that’s really what they are, they are a loan,” Chen Zinner told The Lever. “There’s an expectation to be repaid, there’s a consequence if they aren’t repaid, so it’s really a loan.”
The Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund said in an April 15 letter that the OCC is still too predisposed to approve deals, despite the focus on negative merger characteristics in the national bank regulator’s proposed policy statement. “The thematic flaw in the proposed policy statement is that its fundamental orientation is to approve mergers and not to evaluate merger applications,” the group said.
Christine Zinner, senior consumer policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform, suggested that the financial services industry is “really scraping the bottom of the barrel” with the latest arguments. “Wall Street and predatory lenders will never give up trying to stop the CFPB,” she said in a statement. “An agency devoted to fighting such powerful interests will never be home free.”
“The Fifth Circuit has once again sided with Wall Street and its private-equity billionaires to block reasonable protections for both the public interest and workers saving for retirement,” said Andrew Park, a senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform, which advocates for tighter controls in the financial sector. “The Supreme Court needs to reverse this outrageous decision.”
The bill’s worst feature rewrites longstanding securities law for crypto’s benefit by exempting a large set of crypto products from the definition of “security” in the SEC’s authorizing law, even though many crypto products clearly are securities and should be regulated as such. This loophole would erode key protections for crypto buyers and create a roadmap for traditional Wall Street firms to evade existing rules, which could further fuel risky speculation and harm a wider array of investors, even if they never touch crypto.