“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced yesterday that it has finalized a set of updated HMDA rules that should significantly improve the quality and value of this data, deepening public understanding of the mortgage market and advancing efforts to make credit available fairly, safely, and broadly.”
“Closing the carried interest loophole should be among the first items considered in the ongoing negotiations to prevent the damaging and indiscriminate sequester cuts and to invest in critical programs that support low- and middle-income Americans,” the organizations wrote in the letter. “The carried interest loophole is an egregious violation of the principle of tax fairness.”
“These are matters of vital public significance, and it is a sign of progress that they are on the public agenda for the 2016 election… In a number of important areas, however, the plan largely restates existing law or practice, or reiterates commitments that regulators have already made. As a totality it does not go far enough to address the scale and scope of the problems of our financial system. “
“We, the undersigned organizations concerned with data privacy and consumer protection, write to express grave concerns raised by the early reports of the significant data security breach affecting T-Mobile customers and applicants whose information was stored by Experian. “
“The University of Georgia School of Law is sponsoring an important panel on America’s banking system at the National Press Club in Washington. Panelists Simon Johnson ( Ronald A. Kurtz [1954] Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management and author of 13 Bankers and White House Burning); Lisa Donner (Executive Director, Americans for Financial Reform) and Mehrsa Baradaran (Associate Professor of Law, University of Georgia, and author of the new book How the Other Half Banks) will be in conversation, moderated by David Dayen.”
“Class actions, as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg explained in 1997, create room for “vindication of the rights of groups of people who individually would be without effective strength” to object to wrongdoing. Leaving consumers without “effective strength” is precisely the point of the class-action bans found more and more often in contracts governing student and payday loans, credit and prepaid cards, and other financial products and services.”
“Lisa Donner, head of Americans for Financial Reform… dismissed the notion that Congress needs to re-debate the agency’s structure. ‘Each month that goes by, it’s easier to make the case that CFPB is doing its job,’ Donner said. ‘These questions have been asked and answered.’”
It’s “a form of agency leadership that has been shown again and again to produce weak regulation and enforcement at best, and partisan gridlock at worst,” said Jim Lardner of AFR. “The commission idea is being promoted by an alliance of financial industry lobbyists and lawmakers who have been out to undermine the Bureau’s effectiveness ever since they failed to block its creation.”
“We are writing to urge you to oppose H.R. 3192, which insulates lenders from accountability when they make misleading disclosures to homeowners. The bill, which suspends liability to individuals and government for the first four months after the new mortgage disclosure rules take effect, undermines compliance with the new rules by letting lenders off the hook even where homeowners have been harmed. “
“Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) is pleased to submit these responses to the RFI issued by the Department of the Treasury. The extraordinary diversity of on-line lending models and the rapid growth of the sector mean that continued monitoring will be necessary and the sector will likely fall into the purview of multiple regulators. We encourage the Treasury Department to remain active in determining the appropriate regulatory models, and we will further examine the responses to this RFI with interest to evaluate what types of regulation seem appropriate.”