“I think you need an all-of-the-above approach: you use the law that bears Barney Frank’s name, which requires the breakup of any bank that is too big to fail without harming the economy; you pass new legislation, the 21st Century Glass Steagall Act, which is a bipartisan piece of legislation – Senator Warren’s on it, and Senator McCain is on it. And then you need to involve the public and the grass roots in order to build this new voice that’s going to hold these people accountable.” — AFR’s Alexis Goldstein
“’Wall Street and the financial industry were pushing once again for major rollbacks of financial regulation, and to block consumer and investor rights,” said [AFR Executive Director] Lisa Donner… ‘And on this they failed this time, and the rest of us won.’”
“The Post Office is not generally where you go to get a paycheck cashed, but the Campaign for Postal Banking wants to change that. A coalition of industry and community stakeholders, the Campaign delivered petitions with more than 150,000 signatures to the U.S. Postal Service headquarters on Dec. 17, asking Postmaster General Megan Brennan to establish some financial services in post offices around the nation.”
“Right now any bank over $50 billion dollars in size automatically becomes a SIFI [systematically important financial institution]. Richard Shelby, the [Senate Banking Committee] chair… originally called for raising that threshold to $500 billion. But Republicans also want to weaken the ability to designate non-banks as SIFIs. As Marcus Stanley of Americans for Financial Reform told me, ‘The FSOC designation procedure is already lengthy and time-consuming and includes numerous procedural protections for firms under consideration. These bills are designed to make it essentially unworkable.'”
“Alexis Goldstein, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform, says the department has done a poor job of reaching out to Corinthian students who might be eligible for relief… ‘[T]he department should be pursuing a much more comprehensive, multi-pronged outreach strategy in order to ensure that all students victimized by Corinthian are aware of their legal right to pursue debt cancellation.’”
“‘Car dealers and lenders are attacking the guidance because they do not want the CFPB to enforce antidiscrimination laws in car lending,’ the nonprofit group Americans for Financial Reform wrote in a September letter to lawmakers. ‘They have known for decades that car dealer markups lead to discriminatory lending, and they would prefer the CFPB ignore this particular injustice.'”
