The recommendations below are focused on direct relief for consumers and individuals with debt burdens, which should be in addition to other efforts to provide broader fiscal relief and to support small businesses.
The day before Thanksgiving, a chemical plant operated by the TPC Group exploded in Port Neches, Texas spewing contaminants, forcing over 50,000 people to evacuate, and leaving the community with the lingering aftereffects of an industrial disaster. The TPC Group is owned by two private equity (PE) firms, SK Capital Partners (SK) and First Reserve. The private equity owned chemical plants in Texas held by SK Capital have a long record of environmental violations — not just the TPC Group factories but other SK Capital portfolio firms.
New report revealing how in the last 10 years, a staggering 597,000 people working at retail companies owned by private equity firms and hedge funds have lost their jobs. An estimated additional 728,000 indirect jobs have been lost at suppliers and local businesses, meaning Wall Street’s gamble on retail has led to more than 1.3 million job losses in total.
This report discusses how the long-term trend to Wall Street-led growth has been harming the public, and some of the ways the Trump Administration is contributing to it. In particular, the report discusses how today’s deregulation of Wall Street will make the next recession worse and increase the likelihood of repeating the bailouts we saw in response to the 2008 crisis.
Private equity owns over a million U.S. apartment units. Tenants pay a price when corporate landlords buy their buildings. In some cases, private equity buyers have pushed out lower-income tenants – through rent hikes, eviction threats, and more – to flip buildings into high-rent properties to sell for big profits.
Wall Street private equity funds are continuing to snap up homes to pad their expanding portfolio of rental properties. Institutional investors own nearly a quarter million single-family rental homes. Wall Street landlords often hike rents, avoid repairs, gouge tenants with fees, and are more likely to evict tenants.
The financial cycle is a concept developed by economists to understand the reasons why finance-driven growth can be self-defeating. Policymakers need to rebalance our response to recessions and financial crises to prevent any repetition of the experience of 2008-2009, in which benefits flowed to Wall Street, not ordinary Americans.
New members of Congress demonstrated substantially less reliance on money from the financial services industry than incumbents who won re-election in 2018. First-term Democratic members of the House raised, on average, 17 percent of the money for their campaign committees from small donors, compared with 9.4 percent by Democratic incumbents who won re-election.
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund published a new report describing the history of the Volcker Rule and the efforts of the financial industry to undermine it. The Volcker Rule is a central element of post-crisis financial regulation that is intended to be a modern