AFR was joined by 546 civil rights, consumer, labor, faith and community organizations from all 50 states in a letter urging the CFPB to put in place strong rules that will end abusive practices in ‘quick fix’ consumer lending such as payday, auto-title and installment loans.
AFR today called on the public to contact their legislator and demand hearings into the recent revelations about the bank supervision process at the NY Federal Reserve. A recent story by NPR and Pro Publica shows a disturbing pattern of deference to regulated banks that Congress should investigate.
AFR and more than twenty public interest, consumer, and labor organizations sent a letter to members of Congress urging them to oppose HR 3211. This legislation would reopen the door to the higher fees borrowers faced in the lead up to the mortgage crisis.
AFR’s Policy Director, Marcus Stanley, gave a presentation at Brookings Institution’s forum on systemic risk regulation of the insurance industry.
“There are really two elements to this story,” Marcus Stanley of Americans for Finance Reform said. “One is the internal Federal Reserve self-evaluation… that did say that Federal Reserve supervisors tended to be overly deferential to the banks that they supervise [and] tended to be reluctant to take action and reluctant to raise strong criticisms. And then… you get these tapes made by Carmen Segarra which appear to show this exact sort of deferential behavior.”
In a letter to U.S. and EU trade negotiators and finance ministers, more than 50 civil society groups on both sides of the Atlantic have come together to warn that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) currently under discussion could undermine new financial regulations and potentially create significant risks to the global financial system, as well as to investors and consumers.
“This rule is not a cure-all or a magic bullet,” says Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform. “It’s relevant information for investors about how a company works. This disclosure is one piece of the puzzle, but it’s useful to have public and standard — or relatively standard — information.”
We urge the Department of Defense to proceed expeditiously to finalize and implement this new proposal, which would carry out the MLA’s clear intent by providing broad protection for servicemembers against loans designed to lead them into a cycle of debt. We hope to see the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau move forward with its own rulemaking process soon in this important area.
“Marcus Stanley, policy director for Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition including the AFL-CIO labor federation, said the decision should bolster the agency’s efforts to curb recent steps by Wall Street to escape Dodd-Frank by shifting their overseas trading operations. ‘I really hope that this decision is going to stiffen the CFTC’s backbone,’ Stanley said in a phone interview.”
Although the GOP is eager to expose the Fed’s dealings with big banks, it is equally anxious to dole out favors to financial operators… One deregulation bill, H.R. 5405, would exempt a significant swath of the market for derivatives — the complex financial products at the heart of the 2008 meltdown — from Dodd-Frank’s new trading rules. Americans for Financial Reform, the leading voice for Wall Street accountability on Capitol Hill, came out strong against H.R. 5405 and the other deregulation bill, H.R. 5461.