Alex Martin is also a financial regulation specialist (see, we’re not way out over our skis) with a focus on climate. He works at Americans for Financial Reform where he is spending a lot of time looking to beef up support for the SEC’s climate disclosure rule.
Americans for Financial Reform is out with a blog post this morning blasting a coalition of big bank trade groups over their lawsuit against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau seeking to reverse a new agency crackdown on discrimination in banking or banking services. They accuse the groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Consumer Bankers Association, of “trying to drag their disputes with CFPB into a more favorable arena, namely a judiciary with a strong pro-corporate, right-wing bent.”
“If big banks are going to compare themselves to the worst offenders in payments, then they are already losing the argument,” said Renita Marcellin, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform. “Their entire argument is built around trying to distract us from their responsibility for fraud in services that they themselves offer their own customers,” she added.
Elyse Hicks, consumer policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform, a progressive nonprofit, said people may not consider seriously enough whether they’ll still be able to afford payments down the road. “Because of inflation, people may think, ‘I’m going to have to get what I need and pay for it later in these installments,’” she said. “But are you still going to be able to afford the things you’re affording now six months from now?”
Carlyle is rated F, the lowest in the climate credentials scorecard that has been created by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (Pesp) and Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund (Afref). “The scorecard provides important information and analysis that can help investors and communities understand what these firms are doing, and makes very clear that the firm’s climate commitments are largely empty words,” said Oscar Valdes Viera, research manager at Afref and co-author of the climate risks scorecard.
Natalia Renta, senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform, a not for profit organisation, says: “The private equity lobby is bound to throw up smokescreens about what antitrust law can and cannot do, but that misses the point entirely. Higher prices and lower-quality care leading to increased mortality — both characteristics of sectors where private equity has amassed a presence — are indicators of market power, and that is precisely what antitrust law addresses.”
Hays said other Washington advocacy groups are putting more time and money into research, but he said he’s used to being outnumbered. “This is pretty typical with progressive advocacy work,” he said. “As a general rule, there are fewer of us than there are on the other side. And crypto has grown so dramatically that a lot of different advocacy organizations have been slow to recognize it.”
Andrew Park, a senior policy analyst at the progressive Americans for Financial Reform, said a lot of companies also failed to take advantage of the debt binge during the pandemic to make productive investments, citing private equity-owned firms that borrowed money to pay dividends to shareholders. “When you have all this corporate debt that’s been issued, what happens is, it’s less of an immediate implosion and more of a drawn-out process where the debt becomes an amplifier” to any recession. That’s because people lose their jobs and income, which further dampens economic activity.
Polling [from Americans for Financial Reform] has consistently found that the public likes having a strong CFPB. It’s why banking lobbyists try to harp on images of government bureaucrats telling people what to do. But the public on the whole appreciates that the financial services industry is massive and powerful; it put nearly $3 billion into the 2020 elections, [according to AFR research].
“You’re closing a profitable loophole, so there’s no surprise that we’re seeing the type of pushback that we see right now,” says Andrew Park, a senior policy analyst at investor advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform who was recently named to the SEC’s investor advisory committee