Americans for Financial Reform

News Category: Press Releases & Statements

It’s Past Time to Implement the Volcker Rule, Senators Say

Senators Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) have appealed to regulators to finish work on the Volcker Rule, which was meant to prevent banks from engaging in hedge-fund style trading. That basic principle has been “the law of the land for over two years,” the Senators point out in a letter to the heads

JPMorgan CEO Seeks to Rewrite History, AFR Tells Prosecutors

First the government wheedled his company into buying Bear Stearns; then the government sued his company over the misdeeds of Bear Stearns – that’s JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s hard-luck story. Don’t buy it – that’s the message of an AFR letter to the co-chairs of the federal task force that has sued JPMorgan over alleged

Banks Want Legal Immunity for Unaffordable Loans. Tell Your Senator “No Way.”

Bank lobbyists plan to make the most of the lame-duck session of Congress that gets underway after the election. Almost before anyone has a chance to notice, they hope to pass an amendment undermining a crucial piece of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law — the provision that was supposed to keep lenders from pushing

AFR Letter: Keep Tabs on Racial Dimension of Mortgage Settlement

AFR’s foreclosure working group has appealed to the monitor of the national mortgage settlement to include race, ethnicity, and geography in a public process of evaluation. In a letter to Joseph Smith of the North Carolina-based Office of Mortgage Settlement Oversight, the working group pointed out that the mortgage meltdown had a disproportionate impact on

USA Today Calls for Financial Transaction Tax

“In a sane world, high-frequency trading would be a minor specialty at best,” says a 9/27 editorial. “But in the bizarro world that Wall Street has become, such activity now makes up the majority of all trades…” With the SEC preparing to hold a hearing on possible remedies, USA Today proposes a “s a simple