Category Archives: In the News

In The News: Opinion: Wall Street predators destroyed Toys ‘R’ Us. Now they’re coming for Simon & Schuster (Los Angeles Times)

“Private equity is a 40-year-old Wall Street creation that thrives on cost-cutting, wealth extraction, short time horizons, and financial engineering,” wrote Aliya Sarbarhwal, campaigns manager for private equity at AFR. “It bought, sold, and liquidated its way through the American retail sector years ago, and is now jumping into traditional book publishing, a business that demands patience, an appetite for risky new authors and deft marketing.”

In The News: Disentangling the economy from neoliberal financialization (Hewlett Foundation)

“Banks, investment firms, and other Wall Street titans have been allowed to secure a heightened level of control over the entire economy,” wrote Lisa Donner, executive director at Americans for Financial Reform. “With that control, they extract increasing amounts of wealth from workers and communities, and deploy an increasingly complex array of financial instruments and products that compound their revenue and their power.”

In The News: DeJoy’s 10-Year Plan Could Gut USPS. He Doesn’t Want You to Know the Details. (Truthout.org)

“The bottom line is that the public has a right to more transparency and input in the decision-making process at a public institution,” wrote Annie Norman, the “Save the Post Office” campaigner at Take On Wall Street at AFR. “This requires engagement with said public — which DeJoy is actively resisting. When you put a rich, white, private-sector executive who isn’t used to public accountability and cooperation in charge of a treasured public institution, such a clash might be inevitable.”

In The News: Are leveraged loans securities? (Financial Times)

Investor advocates counter that cutting out leveraged loans from the investor protections nearly all other investments enjoy is ridiculous. “Without securities laws, this market becomes a wild west of sorts,” says Andrew Park of Americans for Financial Reform. “The issue is not sophistication. Sophisticated investors couldn’t know themselves that the DOJ was investigating Millennium for Medicare fraud.”

In The News: Are Leveraged Loans Securities? The Answer Could Upend a Trillion Dollar Market (Institutional Investor)

“The International Monetary Fund, the Federal Reserve, and the Bank for International Settlements have been warning of the risk of the growing leveraged loan market for several years. Despite this it has continued to grow,” said Andrew Park, senior policy advisor at the investor advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform.

In The News: Are higher capital requirements bad for the economy? It’s complicated. (American Banker)

“What we hear most from those opposed to higher capital requirements has been fairly qualitative and not grounded in robust data,” said Alexa Philo, a senior policy analyst for the consumer advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform and former Federal Reserve bank examiner. “I have not seen a credible data driven study that makes this case.”

In The News: Lawmakers ask how big is too big for US banks (Risk.net)

“Cox compares the restrictions on bank M&A with the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, first developed as a way to calculate concentration in the airline industry,” said Alex Philo, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform. “The Department of Justice allows this to go up to 2,500 in other sectors, says Cox, but for banks, the limit works out at 1,800, and an acquisition can cause a bank’s index to jump by 200 points.”

In The News: State Farm profits from fossil fuels while canceling fire coverage in California | Opinion (The Sacramento Bee)

Writes AFR’s Caroline Nagy: “The climate crisis is exacerbating our housing affordability crisis. The Federal Housing Finance Agency house price index hit an all-time high in June, pushing the American dream of home-ownership further out of reach. And with homelessness on the rise, record numbers of Americans struggle to secure affordable housing, leading many to move into fire- and flood-prone areas.”

In The News: Bill to Seize Failed Bank CEOs’ Pay Draws Bipartisan Senate Support (The Washington Post)

“There is now bipartisan momentum to pass legislation to hold executives more accountable when Wall Street takes outsized risks that pay off for executives but not the rest of us,” Natalia Renta, senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform, said in an email. “It is a welcome change that some Republicans are finally joining forces with Democrats to advance an important aspect of financial reform.”

In The News: New report about private equity in home health raises red flag, authors say (McKnight’s Home Care)

A new report reveals that the top five private equity firms collected over $850 million in Medicare revenue and operated almost 280 locations in 2020. These findings should sound an alarm bell for antitrust regulators, according to the report’s authors, Diana L. Moss, president of the American Antitrust Institute, and Oscar Valdes Viera, research manager for Americans for Financial Reform. They spoke to McKnight’s Home Care in a Newsmakers podcast.