“They’ve made it easier to hide patterns of discrimination by raising the threshold for reporting, which makes it harder for civil rights lawyers or state attorneys general to draw conclusions when the data is not available,” said Linda Jun, senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit coalition. “So in addition to not going after any bad guys in two years, they are making it a lot harder to find those patterns of discrimination.”
The proposed rules weaken a compliance system that needs to be strengthened, introduce new loopholes and add confusion and inconsistency, all while failing to address the real changes needed to modernize CRA to respond to changes in our country’s demographics and changes in the structure of the banking industry.
Contrary to the mission of CRA, the FDIC/OCC proposal makes it easier for banks to ignore the variety of credit needs in the communities they serve, and leave them further behind.
AFR joined 65 other organizations to write in support of S.J.Res. 56 and H.J.Res.76 to undo Education Secretary DeVos’ 2019 Borrower Defense to Repayment rule. The DeVos rule gutted the Obama Administration’s 2016 rule that added further protections to students who are entitled to debt cancellation after their schools broke the law. An analysis of the Department’s own calculations estimates that only 3 percent of the loans that result from school misconduct would be cancelled under the new rule. Schools would be held accountable for reimbursing taxpayers for just 1 percent of these loans.
Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz: “[A] recent study by groups including Americans for Financial Reform found that private-equity bankruptcies in the retail industry alone cost 600,000 jobs. One of those laid off, Giovanna De La Rosa, told of her experiences in this publication. The best outcome would be fewer bankruptcies, but when they happen, the welfare of workers needs to be at the top of the list, not at the bottom.”
FDIC Chair Jelena McWilliams “is doing the bidding of loan sharks who have a decades-long history of trying to get around state consumer protection rules,” Americans for Financial Reform spokesperson Carter Dougherty observed. “And now a federal regulator is helping them do it.”
