“The nonprofits Public Citizen and Americans for Financial Reform have released an early copy of their new “roadmap” for climate-finance reform to The Weekly Planet. It’s a guide to what the new executive branch might do to shift the flows of capital toward greener investments.”
“Not that this will be easy. Yesterday, Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania, wrote a letter to the San Francisco Fed implying that it should stop researching “climate economics,” labeling the topic “bitterly partisan.” He’s not wrong—climate change is bitterly partisan. But all of the country’s largest banks have issued climate policies nevertheless. And if it is partisan, that is because partisans fought greenhouse-gas regulation for so long that climate change has become a costly and whole-of-society issue. The financial system is where those costs come to roost. Any big problem, ignored for long enough, becomes a financial issue.”
The real solution to breaking the power of finance is to rebalance the recession-wracked economy. Rather than gambling on the dubious promise of more Americans gaining access to the casino, it’s time to rewrite the rules to ensure that the house doesn’t always win, writes Alexis Goldstein, senior policy analyst at AFR.
If he’s confirmed to run the SEC, there will be a lot that needs fixing, says Marcus Stanley, who worked with Gensler as a Senate staffer after the financial crisis. Stanley is now the policy director of Americans for Financial Reform. “It’s an absolutely critical regulator,” says Stanley, about the SEC. But, he says, “the SEC as an organization needs some change.” He says perhaps more than any other regulator, the SEC “continued with its pre-2008 record of deregulation, even after the financial crisis.”
“There’s an emphasis on working people, racial justice and inequality, and that’s a good place to start,” said Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, an advocacy group that met with Ms. Yellen this month. “But reversing things that the current Treasury Department has done is not enough.”
“The conflict of interest is just so completely glaring,” said Marcus Stanley, the policy director of Americans for Financial Reform, a nonpartisan Wall Street watchdog. “Almost all of ICE’s important activities are regulated in very fine detail by the C.F.T.C.”
Next month, Joe Biden is going confront not only a terrible pandemic but also a pressing economic challenge. And this challenge is unfolding beyond Washington as the sum of thousands of smaller economic challenges being felt in statehouses, county seats, and city halls all across the country. Fortunately, there are tools at hand that President Biden can use. But he’ll have to be bold.
