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.
“The best that can be said here is that the Supreme Court appears to appreciate the gravity of this case and the danger for the CFPB, the Federal Reserve, consumers and overall financial stability,” said Elyse Hicks, a lawyer at the progressive Americans for Financial Reform. “But the justices now need to reverse what the lower courts have wrought, which is already causing trouble.”
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.