New report providing a snapshot of how every member of Congress voted on consumer protections, climate financial regulation, Wall Street, and financial industry legislative measures during the first session of the 118th Congress.
AFREF, in partnership with Capital Strategies for the Common Good, the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, and Bargaining for the Common Good, have produced a report highlighting how, in recent decades, housing has become increasingly commodified and financialized, while tenants in communities across the country are being crushed under unsustainable rent burdens and a shortage of affordable housing.
Climate change is a risk multiplier that exacerbates racial and economic inequality, and it is progressing at an alarming rate. Acute and increasingly frequent climate-related disasters, such as wildfires and hurricanes, as well as chronic issues such as heat stress, sea level rise, and drought,
Private equity firms have become some of the country’s biggest corporate landlords. Americans for Financial Reform estimated that as of June 2022, at a minimum, private equity firms owned real estate rented by around 1.6 million families.
The Paycheck Protection Program, a critical pillar of the CARES Act pandemic relief legislation, failed to equitably distribute money despite an avowed goal of focusing on small businesses, according to a new report from AFREF and six other public interest organizations and labor unions.
Private equity investment firms have quietly bought up close to 700 predominantly fossil fuel-fired electric power plants, making these Wall Street investment houses major greenhouse gas emitters.
The Sierra Club, Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, and Public Citizen released an analysis of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) report on climate-related financial risk. The analysis outlines the report’s disappointing lack of urgency and details the missed opportunities to chart a comprehensive course
Reproduced and linked below is an AFR Education Fund memo on issues around the design of a national public investment bank that would be a modernized successor to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Link to pdf document: Policy memo on public investment bank – working draft
Today, private equity controls some 8,000 companies in the United States, more than twice as many companies as are publicly traded on U.S. stock markets. Private equity firms manage more than $4 trillion in U.S. assets and now own companies that collectively employ nearly 9 million American workers.
Like many PE firms, Sun Capital Partners often buys up existing businesses, loots their assets, squeezes workers, decimates jobs through layoffs and bankruptcy, and threatens workers’ retirement benefits.
Kathleen Kraninger, the current director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told an audience of bankers at a November 2019 industry gathering that “you are really helping drive the agenda.” Unfortunately for the public and for consumer financial protection, the Kraninger agenda and the Wall Street lobby’s priorities are indeed all too similar, and that has proved true even during the COVID-19 pandemic and massive economic distress it has produced.