Majorities of American voters across parties believe that the student debt burden – now at $1.5 trillion – represents a crisis for the country, according to a new poll. The survey also found widespread concern with efforts by Mick Mulvaney, the Trump official installed at the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to gut the agency’s student lending office.
A new polling memo from Americans for Financial Reform and the Center for Responsible Lending documents the widespread agreement among American voters that the student debt burden, now at $1.5 trillion, is a crisis.
Brokers too often steer investors into poorly performing, high-cost investments that are profitable for the broker, but bad for individual investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed a new regulation that purports to address the problem, but its remedy is too vague and too weak. By creating a veneer of protection, but not the reality, it would deliver a false sense of security that could leave investors worse off than they are now.
The rule’s most significant failing is that it does not establish a clear uniform best interest standard, one that is no less stringent than that found in the Investment Advisers’ Act, for all professionals who provide investment advice to retail clients. Instead, it adopts a weaker standard for broker-dealers that falls short of a true best interest standard and does not adequately address the conflicts of interest that too often are permitted to taint broker-dealers’ recommendations.
Voters of all political parties overwhelmingly oppose the actions taken by Mick Mulvaney to undermine the mission of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and feel a strong connection between lax enforcement of the rules on Wall Street and their daily welfare. Ten years after the 2008 financial crisis brought on a searing recession, the survey revealed enduring, strong, and bipartisan support for tougher regulation of Wall Street and predatory lenders.
On July 24, Americans for Financial reform hosted a conference looking back at the response to the 2008 crisis, and towards future efforts to ensure that the financial system is more stable, and fair for all. Click here to access the agenda, video, and (soon) the transcript
“The proposed Borrower Defense rule sacrifices students’ rights in order to line the pockets of executives at for-profit colleges, an industry that has shown time and again that it will use taxpayer dollars to deceive and defraud its own students.” said Alexis Goldstein, AFR’s Senior Policy Analyst. “With this rule and its extreme and absurd barriers to relief, Devos effectively tells students that if a school scams them, they’re on their own.”
On July 24, 2018, Americans for Financial Reform, the Center for Economic Justice, the Consumer Federation of America, and U.S. PIRG, sent a joint letter to members of the House Committee on Financial Services urging them to vote in opposition to HR 5059, the “State
Americans for Financial Reform and ten other organizations sent a joint letter to members of the House Committee on Financial Services urging them to reject H.R. 2570, the Mortgage Fairness Act of 2017.
Nearly a decade after the crisis broke, we need the public interest, not Wall Street’s narrow pursuit of maximum benefits for a tiny few to guide financial policy. But Wall Street’s money is an enormously powerful force pushing the other way.