Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund (AFREF) applauds the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for seeking comment on this strong first draft of principles to guide large banks on how to manage the risk that climate change poses to their safety and soundness.
The federal authorities should halt all bank merger approvals until they strengthen the outdated guidelines that govern whether financial institutions can combine, according to a letter delivered today by 30 public interest organizations.
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund (AFREF) submitted comments to the Labor Department supporting a proposed rule that will allow and encourage private retirement plans and pensions to consider sustainability factors like climate change, workers’ rights, racial, economic and environmental justice, and corporate governance when investing and voting proxies.
Americans for Financial Reform welcomes the FDIC’s action on reviewing bank mergers. In the last 15 years, the federal bank regulators have rubber-stamped merger applications. This has led to unprecedented consolidation in the industry which has hurt consumers and small businesses, in the form of bank deserts and decreased lending to small businesses while lining the pockets of the banking executives. We look forward to commenting on ways to strengthen the bank merger guidelines to protect the interest of the communities they are supposed to serve.
We appreciate the work of the CFPB on drawing attention to the harms of overdraft fees, which take billions of dollars a year out of the pockets of mostly low- and moderate-income households to pad the bottom lines of the country’s big and small banks. And among those households, Black and Latinx households were also far more likely to incur overdrafts. We urge the CFPB to use all the tools that Congress gave it to protect consumers from abuses, including drafting tough new regulations.
Americans for Financial Reform supports the introduction of the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act of 2021. This legislation would extend the 36 percent APR cap on payday and car-title loans in the Military Lending Act (MLA) to cover all borrowers.