The Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the funding method Congress chose for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, allowing a vital agency to continue its work in holding Wall Street and predatory lenders to account, and promoting economic and racial justice. The case stems from a lawsuit against the CFPB brought by the Community Financial Services Association over a regulation that prohibited lenders from withdrawing funds from consumer accounts after two failed attempts due to lack of funds. CFSA, a lobby group for payday lenders, argued that the CFPB’s funding, which is drawn from the Federal Reserve, is unconstitutional.
The decision by a federal judge in the Fifth Circuit to stay a rule capping credit card late fees is a blow not only to consumers but to the rule of law as right-wing jurists resort to increasingly extreme measures to block sensible regulation. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on March 5 finalized a regulation that caps credit card late fees at $8 in most cases, down from a typical $32. The rule is expected to save consumers about $10 billion each year, an average savings of $220 per year for the more than 45 million people who are charged late fees. The rule only applies to the largest credit card issuers, and was to have taken effect May 14.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) voted to propose a rule implementing an important statutory mandate to ban incentive-based executive compensation that encourages reckless risk-taking, but two other regulators – the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission – have yet to do the same. Congress tasked six agencies with promulgating this critical rule when it passed the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010. But only four out of the six were part of today’s proposal — the FDIC, the OCC, the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), and the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA).
With over half a trillion dollars ($553 billion) in assets under management, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co (KKR) has emerged as a major financier in the energy sector, yet the firm is not required to disclose the full scope of its investments or its impact due to regulatory loopholes. A new report by Private Equity Climate Risks consortium members Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund and Global Energy Monitor, 93 Million: The Carbon Emissions KKR Didn’t Disclose, finds that KKR holds investments in 188 fossil fuel assets in 21 countries, spread among the firm’s ownership of 17 portfolio companies.
New rules on minimum staffing in nursing homes will safeguard patients and health care workers by improving access to consistent and quality care, according to Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is setting a new comprehensive staffing requirement in its final rule on Minimum Staffing Standards for Long-Term Care (LTC) Facilities and Medicaid Institutional Payment Transparency Reporting.
Members of the Save Our Retirement coalition, along with a diverse collection of more than 60 consumer, retirement, and labor groups, today commended the Department of Labor (DOL) for issuing final rules designed to protect Americans from the harmful effects of conflicts of interest when financial advisers provide retirement investment advice: The rules will require all financial professionals who provide retirement investment advice to put the best interests of their clients ahead of what’s best for their own pockets. This commonsense requirement is long overdue and promises to be a major improvement over the status quo, which allows too many financial professionals and firms to offer self-serving retirement advice at the expense of workers and retirement savers.
