The Fed must aggressively attempt to retain institutional credibility as a neutral actor in our economic order with regards to the distributional effects of its policies. It should not help finance a merger wave that leads to large-scale consolidation of companies which would have been healthy competitors but for temporary impacts of the current crisis.
Public advocates sent a letter to Congress in support of the Pandemic Anti-Monopoly Act, a proposal from Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to prevent big corporations and Wall Street investors from exploiting the pandemic to further consolidate their economic and political power.
Unless Congress and regulators act, private equity will shed its nonperforming assets and feast on new ones. J. Crew is the latest example.
Private equity firms loaded J. Crew with debt and hid assets away from investors and creditors.
Americans of all partisan identities, and across all regions of the United States, strongly support enacting new consumer protections on high-interest lending during the coronavirus crisis. Americans are highly supportive of prohibiting all high-interest loans during the crisis and of capping interest rates for consumer loans, according to a new bipartisan poll from Lake Research Partners and Chesapeake Beach Consulting.
Preppy retailer cannot survive retail and coronavirus economic downturn saddled by private equity-imposed financial burdens.
[T]he process of rolling back the mandatory underwriting requirement provisions of the 2017 small-dollar lending rule was, at best, highly improper. We urge you to suspend the finalization of the rule pending a full investigation of the facts. There is a strong case to be made that the CFPB needs to restart the regulatory process entirely.
Letter calling on Congress to include consumer protections in COVID-19 relief
Joint letter asking FHFA, HUD, VA and USDA to provide tenants with a mechanism to identify whether their apartment, home, or manufactured housing is covered by the tenant protections in the CARES Act
Yesterday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) rejected the proposed private equity takeover of the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the non-profit that manages the non-commercial, charity, and non-profit internet domain registry for all Dot-Org websites. The decision recognized that the private equity debt loads and extractive business model would hinder Dot-Org’s ability to serve its non-profit clients without raising prices, compromising service, creating new revenue streams that comprise users’ data and privacy, or otherwise imposing unfair costs on 10 million organizations.