“Americans for Financial Reform urged members of Congress to allow Operation Choke Point and other oversight of payment fraud to continue. ‘Banks are not always aware that they are being used to facilitate illegal activity,’ their July 15 letter said. ‘But when they choose profits in the face of blatant signs of illegality, they become an appropriate target for enforcement action.’”
Testifying before a House Financial Services subcommittee on July 15, Lauren Saunders of the National Consumer Law Center warned against measures that “would undermine important efforts underway at the Department of Justice and banking regulators designed to ensure that banks do not facilitate illegal activity.”
Appearing before the House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Consumer Credit, AFR Policy Director Marcus Stanley criticized a set of bills that would undermine current consumer protections, weaken Wall Street reforms, and put roadblocks in the way of financial regulators.
AFR sent a letter to members of Congress opposing HR 5016. This bill would place funding restrictions on our financial regulatory agencies. Sections of this bill would undermine consumer protections that are currently in place, weaken Wall Street reforms, and hurt the ability of regulators to do an efficient job protecting the economy.
AFR sent a letter to members of Congress urging them to oppose any effort block funding for the Department of Justice’s Operation Choke Point or to weaken other regulator efforts to fight payment fraud. This proposal works to ensure that banks and payment processors comply with longstanding due diligence requirements so that they can avoid facilitating illegal activity by knowing their customers, monitoring return rates, and being alert for suspicious activity.
“We write to you now on behalf of the millions of families who are still struggling with negative home equity, as well as those who are in danger of losing their homes through foreclosure, and the neighbors and communities hurt by foreclosures around them. The need to swiftly reverse the government sponsored enterprise (GSE) policy on principal reduction remains a major priority for many organizations and community members.”
AFR sent a letter to members of Congress urging them to oppose the “Federal Reserve Accountability and Transparency Act.” This bill would empower Wall Street to prevent effective Federal Reserve oversight of the nation‟s largest banks.
“At the Capitol this afternoon [July 9], Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) received petitions in which nearly 600,000 Americans call for action on the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act. This bipartisan bill, introduced by Senator Warren along with Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), and Angus King (I-Maine), would address the problem of Wall Street banks that have become too complicated, too conflicted and too powerful, as well as simply too big.”
AFR and Public Citizen submitted a comment letter to the Federal Reserve Board, calling on them to close the loophole in its proposed ban on big bank mergers,
““We had been warning for years about this loophole in the CFTC’s cross-border guidance,” Marcus Stanley, policy director for American for Financial Reform, told Bloomberg’s Silla Brush. “Now the CFTC seems to be letting it become an exit-ramp from Dodd-Frank.”