Category Archives: Statements and Press Releases

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AFR Statement: Senate Banking Committee Takes Up Dangerous Securities Bills

“The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs meets today to conduct hearings on a set of bills ostensibly designed to increase access to capital. Several of these bills are part of a dangerous agenda to rollback securities markets regulations. The deregulation of private capital markets contemplated in these bills would disproportionately affect small, retail investors vis-à-vis large investors and would undermine the effective regulations and investor protections that are fundamental principles of stable and enlarging U.S. public capital markets. “

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AFR Statement: Weak SEC Proposal on Broker Standards

Statement from Marcus Stanley, policy director, Americans for Financial Reform: “The proposal we heard described today does not come close to measuring up. The standard of conduct the agency has articulated appears ambiguous at best. It doesn’t simply ban the sales quotas and other compensation practices that lead brokers to put their clients into high-fee, lower-yielding investments.”

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Statement: Consumer Groups Launch Website Tracking Mick Mulvaney’s Anti-Consumer Actions

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 11, 2018 CONTACT: Carter Dougherty, carter@ourfinancialsecurity.org, (202) 251-6700 Consumer Groups Launch Website Tracking Mick Mulvaney’s Anti-Consumer Actions  WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, as Mick Mulvaney, the unlawfully appointed Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), testifies before the House Financial

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Stop the Debt Trap Statement: By Going to Court, Predatory Lenders Aim to Keep Distressed Borrowers in Debt

“Payday lenders have spent millions lobbying for rules that would let them exploit consumers, so it’s no surprise they are launching a lawsuit against the CFPB rule, which is about the most sensible consumer protection imaginable. It would require lenders to assess a borrower’s ability to repay a loan so they don’t fall into a cycle of debt, nothing more,” said Lisa Donner, Executive Director, Americans for Financial Reform.

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Joint Statement: In Message to Congress, Mulvaney Betrays Mandate to Protect Consumers

“Like other federal regulators, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is supposed to give regular updates to Congress on the work it has done to fulfill its statutory mandate. Under Mick Mulvaney, the consumer watchdog has used its just-released semiannual report for a very different purpose: to urge Congress to take away its power to fulfill that mandate.”

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Stop the Debt Trap Statement: Mulvaney Continues to Let Payday Lenders Off the Hook

Trump’s unlawfully appointed Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Mick Mulvaney is giving predatory payday lenders a free pass. Specifically, National Credit Adjusters, a debt collector for payday loan companies with 685 complaints against it, confirmed that a pending case against the company is “dead.”

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AFR Statement: Omnibus Contains Yet More Gifts to Wall Street

“The Omnibus budget package contains several policy riders designed to benefit Wall Street investment funds and big banks at the expense of the public. One provision in the omnibus allows Business Development Companies (BDCs), a type of private equity fund sold directly to retail customers, to double their permitted fund leverage from the current 1-1 level (one dollar of borrowed money for each dollar of investor equity) to 2-1. BDCs are already the beneficiary of regulatory exemptions since conventional closed-end mutual funds can only leverage 1-2, or borrow one dollar per two dollars of investor equity…”