For the crypto wealthy, hope springs eternal but the rest of us should be very skeptical. Even after the collapse of many crypto companies erased the industry’s credibility along with a lot of fake and real money, the Republican House of Representatives majority wants to dole out favors for stablecoin issuers, the supposedly durable crypto asset.
“When the top regulator of the biggest American banks describes the problems that he regularly encounters with them and announces a process for downsizing or even breaking them up, there is reason for optimism. But there is cause for pessimism, too, since that regulator’s agency is historically Wall Street’s biggest friend in Washington” wrote Sarah Pray, managing director for policy at Americans for Financial Reform.
A 1% threshold for all line-items in companies’ financial statements is “not the hill I would die on,” said Alex Martin, a senior policy analyst for climate at Americans for Financial Reform, which advocates for tougher financial regulation.
During a virtual event this week with the American Economic Liberties Project and Americans for Financial Reform, Warren came down hard on crypto once more, after an unprecedented year of failure that has left a black mark on the industry as a whole.
“The OCC has a long record of being super-tight with the big banks. The onus is on them to ensure that this plan on too-big-to-manage is not just paper-pushing,” says Sarah Pray, managing director for policy at Americans for Financial Reform. “Process is nice, but results – delivered promptly – that finally end chronic abuse of consumers by too-big-to-manage megabanks would be better.”
Andrew Park, senior policy analyst for hedge funds and private equity at Americans for Financial Reform and the author of the report, estimates the volume of leveraged loans and high-yield debt outstanding has roughly doubled since 2008, while the volume of direct-lending debt has increased from virtually zero to an estimate of more than $1 trillion. “The fact is that there is no good way to understand how indebted companies actually are,” [Mr. Park] said. “We have guesses and estimates based on the data out there, but there is no standardized way to look at it.”
Private equity firms, private equity-backed firms, firms that offer private equity real estate funds, and firms with other private equity co-investors or joint ventures own at least 1 million apartment units in the country – around 3.6% of all apartments – according to a June 2022 research memo by Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit and non-partisan coalition.
Our rent affordability crisis has hit people of color particularly hard. Nationally, over half of Black and Latinx households rent their homes, compared to just 28 percent of white households. Forty percent of homeless Americans are Black, compared to 13 percent of the U.S. population.
“The fact that there were no commitments for the vehicles to be union-made is a glaring omission for an administration that prides itself on being union friendly,” said Porter McConnell, campaign director of the consumer rights group Take on Wall Street and co-founder of the Save the Post Office Coalition. “We will be looking to future announcements committing to the Oshkosh and the commercial off-the-shelf vehicles being union-made, which we know is entirely feasible.”
For private equity firms, said Andrew Park, a policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform, “it’s heads I win, tails you lose.”