“Yesterday the Federal Reserve issued its final rule on emergency lending. In response to bipartisan criticism of the 2013 proposal from, among others, Senators Elizabeth Warren and David Vitter, Representative Jeb Hensarling, and Americans for Financial Reform, the Federal Reserve has significantly modified its initial proposal.”
The House of Representatives passed two ill-advised financial deregulation bills on November 18th. Both are giveaways to some of the country’s biggest banks. Both, if they ever became law, would mark a dangerous retreat from the financial reforms put in place after the financial crisis.
“Supporters of the “Reforming CFPB Indirect Auto Financing Guidance Act,” which passed by a vote of 332 to 96, have tried to hide behind a smokescreen of baseless questions and false claims supplied to them by industry lobbyists. But the clear intent of this bill is to block the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from taking action to combat lending practices that lead to African-American as well as Hispanic and Asian-American borrowers being charged higher interest rates on auto loans.”
ColorOfChange, Working Families, Center for Popular Democracy and Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) delivered over 50,000 petitions urging Congress not to pass H.R. 1737, which would block the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from working to fight discrimination in car loans.
“These deregulatory measures are on the committee’s docket only as a result of massive lobbying by large financial institutions seeking a license to continue playing the kinds of heads-they-win-tails-we-lose games that were at heart of the financial crisis. Lawmakers need to decide whether to let the financial industry have its way or stand up for the public interest.”
With a government shutdown narrowly averted and budget negotiations moving into a potentially volatile final stage, more than 160 national, state and local organizations are telling lawmakers and the Administration not to let the process be used to force through ideological spending riders that would block financial reform or undermine the funding or authority of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced yesterday that it has finalized a set of updated HMDA rules that should significantly improve the quality and value of this data, deepening public understanding of the mortgage market and advancing efforts to make credit available fairly, safely, and broadly.”
“Closing the carried interest loophole should be among the first items considered in the ongoing negotiations to prevent the damaging and indiscriminate sequester cuts and to invest in critical programs that support low- and middle-income Americans,” the organizations wrote in the letter. “The carried interest loophole is an egregious violation of the principle of tax fairness.”
“These are matters of vital public significance, and it is a sign of progress that they are on the public agenda for the 2016 election… In a number of important areas, however, the plan largely restates existing law or practice, or reiterates commitments that regulators have already made. As a totality it does not go far enough to address the scale and scope of the problems of our financial system. “
“Class actions, as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg explained in 1997, create room for “vindication of the rights of groups of people who individually would be without effective strength” to object to wrongdoing. Leaving consumers without “effective strength” is precisely the point of the class-action bans found more and more often in contracts governing student and payday loans, credit and prepaid cards, and other financial products and services.”