“You’re closing a profitable loophole, so there’s no surprise that we’re seeing the type of pushback that we see right now,” says Andrew Park, a senior policy analyst at investor advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform who was recently named to the SEC’s investor advisory committee
“This legislation would do quite a bit to undermine existing securities laws by creating an alternative route that could bypass the current, time-tested rules,” said Mark Hays, a senior policy analyst on fintech at Americans for Financial Reform, a progressive advocacy group. He added that the bill would create a new class of securities that lack the necessary investor protections.
In today’s polarized environment, it’s refreshing to see the banking industry and consumer advocacy organizations in agreement over the fact that industrial loan corporations or industrial banks only serve as a loophole for large companies to own a bank. These odd bedfellows range from the Center for Responsible Lending, Americans for Financial Reform and the Woodstock Institute on one end, to the Bank Policy Institute, PNC and the Independent Community Bankers of America on the other.
In the more than 150 years since the end of the Civil War, Black American wealth remains a fraction of that held by White Americans. Just after emancipation in 1865, African Americans owned 0.5% of national wealth. While closing this divide is essential to achieving racial equity in this country, it’s important that we apply the right tools for the job. We can’t properly solve problems without understanding their origins. The growing divide between White wealth and Black wealth is a product of economic systems designed to extract wealth from Black, Indigenous, and other people of color and redirect it to the wealthy, almost uniformly White elite.
“People get this really easily—we’re giving a whole lot of rich people more money for no reason other than them being rich,” says Mandla Deskins, advocacy manager at Take on Wall Street, an organization pressuring members of Congress to jettison this tax break. “It’s not necessarily dead,” Deskins says of the most recent effort to close the loophole, “but it is definitely on pause.”
“There’s nothing happening to reverse the Trump deregulatory agenda at the Fed or to think about what the Fed ought to be doing on financial regulation,” said Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, an advocacy group that represents unions and civil-rights and consumer groups.