Cross-border derivatives regulation is the latest area in which Trump appointees are systematically dismantling the post-2008 framework for regulation of Wall Street and the global “too big to fail” banks. Today, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission drastically weakened their rules governing the massive global markets for financial derivatives.
“Rep. Adams’ amendment gives borrowers a chance to recover on the same timeline the economy is projected to need to return to pre-coronavirus productivity. Granting the same CARES Act suspension of student loan payments to private student loan borrowers, and extending the suspension to September 2021 will mean more funds for food, medicine, and basic household needs.”
“Rep. Dean’s amendment would put borrowers and their families on stronger financial footing and accelerate the economic recovery. Providing up to $10,000 in immediate assistance to pay down a private student loan offers much-needed and long-term relief to the 6 million private student loan borrowers who were left out of the CARES Act entirely.”
AFR joins the Civil Rights Movement and the nation in mourning the passing of John Lewis. We celebrate his leadership, his outsized contributions to the struggle for racial and economic justice – until the very end of his life – and his steadfastness in demanding and defending a more robust democracy. His work as a legislator with a strong moral compass advanced all these strands of work and highlighted the relationship between them all.
Today, 103 civil rights, consumer and advocacy organizations and think tanks sent a joint letter to House and Senate leadership, urging them to include student debt cancellation in the next economic stimulus package.
Led by American for Financial Reform, Demos, Center for Responsible Lending and Freedom to Prosper, the letter stresses the ways that if left unaddressed, the student debt trap will deepen our current recession, slow our economic recovery, exacerbate inequality, and deepen a crisis already facing black and brown borrowers and families.
States and localities provide critical public services, and more than 1.5 million state and local jobs have been lost since February. Without credit support like that which should be provided by this Facility, deeper job losses and service cuts can be expected as states grapple with unprecedented fiscal challenges in the face of the coronavirus crisis. Supporting states and localities is critical for economic recovery and for assisting communities impacted by the dual public health and economic crisis we face.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York announced the initial composition of the index they will be using to purchase corporate bonds through its Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF). The corporations included in their June 5 “Broad Market Index” raise serious concerns about public benefit, solvency, and further incentivizing companies to take on additional debt unnecessarily.
The SEC has released new guidance on corporate disclosures in light of COVID, which includes a recommendation that companies disclose more information about health and safety policies. We see this as a positive first step toward requiring the disclosures requested in a letter sent to the SEC last week by Americans for Financial Reform and nearly 100 other organizations.
The problems the SEC identified include fund managers’ failure to make full and fair disclosure of conflicts of interest, charging improper fees, and failure to implement policies to prevent staff from trading on material non-public information. In other words, the SEC’s examinations have shown that private equity and hedge fund managers are consistently engaged in self-dealing and overcharging investors, like pension funds that provide for the retirement security of millions of Americans.
This legislation will create vitally needed new public protections by putting constraints on the collection, use, sharing, and selling of our personal data by financial services companies and all firms. The Data Accountability and Transparency Act’s bright-line approach appropriately shifts the burden of privacy protection away from consumers, who have minimal resources to protect themselves, and toward corporations, which profit immensely from the aggregation of our data.