“Private equity firms have a long track record of being extractive — that is, extracting wealth from their portfolio companies,” said Carter Dougherty, spokesman for the Americans for Financial Reform, which advocates for regulation of private equity. “When you see Cerberus shaking $4 billion out of a company in a difficult industry like groceries, it’s not out of bounds to say this is yet another episode of industry abuses.”
“A CBDC format that has Big Tech running the back end is just another backdoor way for them to encroach on financial services,” says Mark Hays, a senior policy analyst with Americans for Financial Reform, a policy advocacy group that has been skeptical of CBDCs.
According to a recent analysis from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project and Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund (AFREF), the eight largest buyout firms have put nearly as much money into coal, oil and gas as the big bank.
Alex Martin is also a financial regulation specialist (see, we’re not way out over our skis) with a focus on climate. He works at Americans for Financial Reform where he is spending a lot of time looking to beef up support for the SEC’s climate disclosure rule.
Americans for Financial Reform is out with a blog post this morning blasting a coalition of big bank trade groups over their lawsuit against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau seeking to reverse a new agency crackdown on discrimination in banking or banking services. They accuse the groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Consumer Bankers Association, of “trying to drag their disputes with CFPB into a more favorable arena, namely a judiciary with a strong pro-corporate, right-wing bent.”
“If big banks are going to compare themselves to the worst offenders in payments, then they are already losing the argument,” said Renita Marcellin, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform. “Their entire argument is built around trying to distract us from their responsibility for fraud in services that they themselves offer their own customers,” she added.
