Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund (AFREF) sent a letter to the Treasury Department outlining principles, scope, and direction for the department’s development of a financial inclusion strategy. Developing a financial inclusion strategy is long-overdue and a necessary step to understand and begin to address the contributions of inequitable access to financial products and services for disadvantaged communities to the persistent racial economic inequality in the United States.
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund (AFREF) submitted a comment letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC”) on its proposed guidance for designated contract markets (“DCMs”) on commodity characteristics that should be considered in terms and conditions for the listing of voluntary carbon credit (“VCC”) derivative contracts. The letter recommends that first, the CFTC
Americans for Financial Reform today wrote to the House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security, Illicit Finance, and International Financial Institutions urging members to rely on existing authority by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in order to gain more transparency into the $5 trillion private markets (“exempt offerings” under SEC Rule 144A and Reg D) to address national security concerns.
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund and Consumer Federation of America, Food & Water Watch, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and Public Citizen sent a letter sharing their grave concerns with the justification and potentially calamitous precedent contained in the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC’s) proposed rulemaking for the Investment of Customer Funds by
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund and Consumer Federation of America, Food & Water Watch, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and Public Citizen sent a letter sharing their grave concerns with the justification and potentially calamitous precedent contained in the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC’s) proposed rulemaking for the Investment of Customer Funds by Futures Commission Merchants and Derivatives Clearing Organizations. This proposal would expand the list of permitted investments for customer funds to include foreign debt which could put customers at undue financial risk — avoiding such risk was the rationale for prohibiting these transactions in 2011 after the MF Global meltdown.
The bank lobby is spending vast lobbying dollars to cloak themselves in the mantle of preserving access to credit. But the truth that the banks avoid debating is that the overwhelming impact of higher bank capital is – by design – to restrict how risky and how big the more speculative aspects of their business, notably their trading and investment bank operations can grow.
