Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund joined our partners in sending a letter signed by 83 groups opposing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s proposed reorganization of its Division of Supervision, Enforcement and Fair Lending because it would drastically weaken the office’s authority independence, and effectiveness, and leave consumers vulnerable to harm.
While it’s true that the largest banks currently look solvent in the face of economic stress, this is in significant part because they have benefited greatly from regulatory forbearance and from Federal Reserve intervention in financial markets. This report, based on analysis of regulations and bank financial reports by Americans for Financial Education Fund and Risky Finance, lays out some of the clearest ways in which the nation’s six largest banks have benefited from regulatory forbearance and the Federal Reserve’s financial market interventions.
The folk legend Robin Hood was, as every child knows, the legendary outlaw who robbed from the rich to give to the poor. But in a reincarnation of a long-running Wall Street scheme, it is the wily financiers who rob from the ordinary folk holding investment accounts at Robinhood.
“It’s basically a way to finance state and local investment that doesn’t go through Wall Street and doesn’t leave the community and turn into a windfall for shareholders,” said Porter McConnell, the campaign director of advocacy group Take On Wall Street. “This is more about community development.”
77 organizations call on Education Secretary DeVos to extend the federal student loan suspension Today, 77 community, civil rights, consumer, and student advocacy organizations sent a letter to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, urging her to extend the suspension of payments on federal student loans through September
The regulator of the nation’s largest banks has finalized a rule that allows predatory lenders to do an end-run around state interest rate caps, exposing people to loans in excess of 100% APR that violate state rate limits. Merely by putting a bank’s name on the fine print of the paperwork, predatory lenders could claim that the loan is a bank loan exempt from state rate caps.
On Oct. 19, AFR Executive Director Lisa Donner participated in a virtual conference organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Entitled “Empowering the public to assess large bank resiliency, the conference brought together leading experts to bank transparency to discuss how to maintain and improve transparency of the conditions of major banks.
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund submitted a comment letter asking the Department of Justice to protect the public interest from ever larger banks exercising market power to impose higher costs on consumers, reduce the volume or quality of banking services, and from becoming so large that they pose a risk to the entire financial system and real economy.
Yesterday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission adopted a final rule that purports to limit excessive speculation in crucial commodity markets affecting the price of consumer products ranging from gasoline to bread.
Reproduced and linked below is an AFR Education Fund memo on issues around the design of a national public investment bank that would be a modernized successor to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Link to pdf document: Policy memo on public investment bank – working draft