It would gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, enable reckless behavior by big banks, and hand a special favor to payday lenders. Lawmakers should reject this legislation out of hand.
A major new report released today found that private arbitration firms that decide claims against corporations accused of fraud, sexual harassment, wage theft, abuse of nursing home residents, and other illegal activity are themselves violating the law.
AFR sent the letter below to the Senate Agriculture Committee urging Senators to oppose the nomination of Christopher Giancarlo for chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. AFR Opposition Letter To Confirmation of J Christopher Giancarlo
The OCC’s proposals would directly weaken financial regulatory protections and push aside other agencies so the OCC could take critical guardrails off of Wall Street on its own
In its rush to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank reforms, Treasury Department adopted over three-quarters of the ideas put forth by The Clearing House, an association of the biggest U.S. and international banks
“Americans for Financial Reform opposes the confirmation of Neomi Rao as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Professor Rao’s announced views demonstrate an extreme disregard for the independence of financial regulatory agencies and an unwarranted hostility to critical financial protections.”
“Dodd-Frank is not perfect. For one thing, it is overly complex. And there are worthy reform alternatives that have been put forward that rely less on specific regulations and more on increased capital requirements and structural changes to separate traditional banking from speculative investing… The Treasury report has none of those proposals’ analytical rigor. Rather, it is designed to please the banks. Americans for Financial Reform, a watchdog group, plans to release a paper showing that the Treasury review endorses almost two-thirds of specific deregulatory requests submitted to the Treasury in May by the Clearing House Association, a big bank lobby.”
“‘This legislation takes the worst ideas concocted by Wall Street and predatory lenders, and combines them into one toxic package,” [Lisa Donner, director of Americans for Financial Reform] said. ‘The bill is crammed with deregulatory gifts to the entire industry, including megabanks that want to return to the excessive borrowing and risky practices that led to the financial crisis.’”
“The New York Times obtained draft memos showing that officials initially discussed using budgetary impact as the justification. In other words, they looked for whatever pretense could get them to stop the rule on behalf of for-profit operators. Alexis Goldstein, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform, called the action ‘a slap in the face to defrauded Americans,’ and accused DeVos’s agency of placing ‘the interests of wealthy for-profit college executives ahead of students striving for a better life.’”