Americans for Financial Reform sent a letter to the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee supporting the Credit Card Competition Act of 2023. The Credit Card Competition Act will introduce much needed competition in a captured market and benefit consumers.
AFR sent a letter in opposition to four legislative proposals that the House Committee on Education and the Workforce is scheduled to consider at its September 14th Full Committee Markup. These bills’ amendments to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) would undermine workers’ retirement security and are part of a broader political campaign against common sense investment practices. The campaign seeks to force financial actors to ignore a slew of financial risks regardless of the consequences for workers’ retirement security and the integrity of our financial system.
Americans for Financial Reform sent a letter to the House Financial Services Committee opposing bills that undermine shareholders’ ability to make sound financial decisions and hold corporations accountable. In our letter, we provide an overview of the bills noticed during the various ESG hearings and briefly discuss why we oppose them.
Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress sent a letter to Congress today expressing opposition to H.R. 4766, the Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act of 2023. Both groups fear the bill as posted creates a regulatory pathway that is too permissive for so-called stablecoins (which are rarely stable) and that would fail to adequately protect consumers and increase the potential risks stablecoins pose to financial markets and systems.
Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress joined other consumer advocacy and public interest organizations in sending a letter to Congress expressing opposition to H.R. 4763, The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, a bill intended to create a market regulatory structure for digital assets.
AFR led 58 organizations in expressing opposition to the anti-ESG policy agenda that seeks to insulate the management of public companies from investor input and accountability and undermine regulations that would equip investors with more information to make better decisions about their investments. It was submitted to the record ahead of six House Financial Services Committee hearings on the topic.
AFR urged opposition to bill doubling down on the so-called Opportunity Zones program that has brought little to no benefit to communities while further enriching a handful of wealthy tech and Wall Street investors and real estate titans.
AFR led a letter signed by 84 national, state, and local groups ranging from civil rights, consumer protection, labor unions, antitrust, and general public interest groups voicing our collective support for the work and mission of the CFPB. In the letter we highlight the importance of an agency dedicated solely to consumer protection and the work the CFPB has done to make customers whole after harm was done. We again push back on the agenda to limit the agency’s effectiveness by subjecting the agency to annual appropriations, changing its leadership structure to a commission, and the most recent proposal to raise the asset threshold for companies under the CFPB’s supervision to $50 billion from the current $10 bn threshold.
AFR sent a letter to members of Congress opposing several capital markets bills that fail to address the inherent lack of information and protections in investing in private offerings while opening the door for more investors to have access to such products by using these proposed pathways to become an “accredited investor”.
AFR sent a letter opposing H.R. 3556 “Increasing Financial Regulatory Accountability and Transparency Act,” a bill supposedly to make the Fed more transparent, which will instead hamstring the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s (“FSOC”) ability to effectively monitor risk in the financial system. This bill would subject the FSOC’s designation authority to Congressional review, which would allow any firm the FSOC designates as systemically important to lobby Congress to rescind the FSOC’s designation. This would render the FSOC designation authority under the Dodd-Frank Act futile and unnecessarily politicize the agency’s efforts to monitor companies that pose an outsized risk to our financial system. This bill comes at the heels of the FSOC’s announcement to reinvigorate its designation process, a welcome step in preventing the next financial crisis.