AFR’s Senior Policy Analyst Alexis Goldstein will be participating in the Debates of the Century @NYU Wagner, a public debate series showcasing thoughtful, informed dialogue from experts. She will be arguing that the government should cancel student debt. The event is co-hosted by The Century Foundation and NYU Wagner.
The AFR Education Fund wrote a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission supporting the agency’s proposal to require anonymous trading of cleared derivatives on Swaps Execution Facilities. Revealing the identity of trading partners can prevent new competitors from entering these markets and bidding down
The U.S. Supreme Court is preparing to hear oral arguments on Tuesday, March 3, on Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The case is about whether the authority of this independent agency, led by a single director who can be removed only for cause, violates the separation of powers.
Joint letter in support of the Housing Fairness Act of 2020
It is “disappointing,” said Linda Jun, senior policy counsel for Americans for Financial Reform. The CFPB should bar the collection of debts that have passed their statute of limitations altogether. “The whole point of statute of limitations is that the government has decided that the debt is no longer collectible,” Jun said. “If you can’t be sued on it, why are you getting mail on it?”
The supplemental rule states that debt collectors must provide consumers with specific disclosures when collecting debt that is beyond the statute of limitations (time-barred debt). The proposed disclosures would be in addition to the CFPB’s proposal announced in May to prohibit collectors from filing or threatening a lawsuit on a time-barred debt, but only if the collector “knows or should know” that the legal time limit to sue has expired.
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund and the Electronic Frontier Foundation said the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which coordinates the operation and maintenance of the internet’s domain name system, should make sure that the transaction will “not imperil the future operation of .ORG” before allowing it to proceed.
“PIR LLC will have to generate substantial additional revenue to service the debt which could force PIR LLC to take advantage of its monopoly position to raise prices to unsustainable levels, impose new service charges, reduce technical upkeep that could impair web connectivity or non-profit email traffic, or pursue other business strategies that could undermine the independence of non-profits including suspending or transferring domain names, in effect a censorship-for-profit strategy that has been used by other domain registries and internet companies.”
The AFR Education Fund wrote a letter to the FDIC regarding the analysis of costs and benefits, in which we urged the regulator not to impose a false and excessively narrow framework of “cost-benefit analysis” on their decisions. Download the letter here.
The private equity industry promotes itself as serving the investing public — including union and other pension funds — by providing reliably superior returns than the stock market. But the reality is that PE investments are not necessarily better performers, their promises too often rely