News Category: AFR in the News
In the News: Private equity’s terrible impact on New Jersey’s nursing homes (The Star-Ledger)
“As COVID-19 swept through New Jersey’s nursing homes, residents and workers got sick and died, families struggled to get basic information about their loved ones, and caregivers were rightly terrified that they would bring the virus back to their own families. What few realized is how a secret Wall Street takeover of much of the long-term care industry has amplified the health risks to those who live and work in nursing homes” according to AFR Senior Researcher Patrick Woodall and 1199SEIU Executive Vice President Milly Silva.
In The News: A reckoning for SPACs: will regulators deflate the boom? (Financial Times)
In February, a letter sent to the House Financial Services Committee by the progressive non-profit Americans for Financial Reform called on Congress to expand the blank-cheque company definition and amend securities law to exclude SPAC mergers from liability protections. “As long as there’s money to be made in every part of the SPAC issuance process, I don’t expect to see changes unless you start to see some more scrutiny,” says Andrew Park, senior policy analyst at AFR.
In The News: Biden’s New Playbook for Greening the Financial System (The Atlantic)
“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.”
In The News: Opinion: The Trouble With GameStop Is That the House Still Wins (The New York Times)
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.
In The News: Wall Street Insider Turned Tough Market Cop: Biden’s Pick To Head SEC (NPR)
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.”