Americans for Financial Reform

Government Category: Advocacy Documents

Letters to Regulators: Organizations Weigh in on Treasury’s Peer to Peer Lending

“…responses to the RFI issued by the Department of the Treasury. The extraordinary diversity of on-line lending models and the rapid growth of the sector mean that continued monitoring will be necessary and the sector will likely fall into the purview of multiple regulators. We encourage the Treasury Department to remain active in determining the appropriate regulatory models, and we will further examine the responses to this RFI with interest to evaluate what types of regulation seem appropriate.”

AFR Testimony: Expansion of ERISA Fiduciary Duty Protection is “Long Overdue”

“Over the forty years since the existing DOL rule was written, retirement markets have transformed and workers have become overwhelmingly reliant on self-directed savings. Due to the loopholes in the current rule, brokers providing advice on such self-directed savings can easily evade the fiduciary protections that Congress intended to provide to workers saving for their retirement through employment-based plans.”

Letter to Regulators: AFR Calls on Department of Labor to Protect Retirement Investors

“This is a huge problem – one that, over time, can easily add up to a difference of tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in retirement savings. Under the current rules, some of the financial professionals offering retirement investment advice are legally bound to look out for the best interests of their clients; but other professionals, while perceived as having such a duty and clearly benefiting from the perception, are free to put their own interests first, even if that means saddling their clients with needlessly high fees or inappropriate risks.”

Letter to Congress: Lawmakers Should Let Federal Reserve Do Its Job

“On behalf of Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), we are writing to express our opposition to “The Federal Reserve Reform Act of 2015”. Among other responsibilities, the Federal Reserve is the single most significant regulator of U.S. financial institutions, including the large Wall Street banks that played a central role in the 2008 financial crisis. “