“AFR supports this proposal to require the recovery of erroneously awarded executive compensation as a condition for exchange listing. Failures in corporate governance have been singled out by many observers, including the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, as a significant cause of the global financial crisis. “
“We urge you to reject any such proposal that weakens or delays these crucial protections, whether it is based on H.R. 1090 or a phony Wall Street ‘alternative’ to DOL rules. Instead, you should stand with your hard-working constituents saving for retirement who deserve financial advice that is in their best interest, no matter who provides it.”
“The undersigned consumer and civil rights organizations write to urge you to issue final prepaid card rules that prevent payday lenders and other predatory lenders from attaching dangerous credit features to the cards. We appreciate the strong elements of the proposed rules, which recognize that overdraft services are a form of credit and that credit accessed through cards must have the robust protections of the Credit CARD Act. While the proposed rules will stop some abuses, we are concerned that loopholes in the proposal can be exploited.”
“…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.”
“Consumer groups are deeply skeptical of the debate, arguing it is just a talking point for the regional and big banks to weaken Dodd-Frank. ‘It’s basically an attempt to put up a sort of fog of complicated technical terms around industry’s desire to reverse pretty basic financial reforms,’ said Marcus Stanley, policy director for public advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform. There’s no academic consensus on any single best way to measure [liquidity] … so you can raise it as this boogeyman in a way that is not really particularly connected to the substantive issues.'”
“Bonds seem to trade in smaller transaction sizes than they once did… That is perceived as a sign of illiquidity… A better indication, according to a presentation by Marcus Stanley, policy director of Americans for Financial Reform, would be total trading in the corporate market, which in fact has slightly increased since the financial crisis.”
“AFR once again calls on regulators to reconsider and end their sweeping regulatory exemptions for international derivatives operations of U.S. banks and to provide greater transparency to the public concerning the size and potential impact of such exemptions.”
“Over the forty years since the existing DOL rule was written, retirement markets have transformed and workers have become overwhelmingly reliant on self-directed savings. Due to the loopholes in the current rule, brokers providing advice on such self-directed savings can easily evade the fiduciary protections that Congress intended to provide to workers saving for their retirement through employment-based plans.”
“Runaway pay, repeated studies have shown, inhibits teamwork, reduces employee morale and productivity, and encourages executives to make dangerous short-term bets. The SEC heard from hundreds of thousands of people about this rulemaking; the messages and comments were overwhelmingly positive, and rightly so.”
“‘Fixing much of this could have been done 10 years ago by higher capital requirements, which we failed to do, but we need to move more in that direction,” [Sherrod] Brown, now the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said at a press conference this month with Americans for Financial Reform.'”