AFR Comment Letter: On Forward Contracts With Embedded Volumetric Optionality
Download the letter here.
Download the letter here.
“Since December, Congress has twice passed measures to weaken regulations in the Dodd-Frank financial law that are intended to reduce the risk of another financial meltdown. In the last election cycle, Wall Street banks and financial interests spent over $1.2 billion on lobbying and campaign contributions, according to Americans for Financial Reform. Their spending strategy appears to be working. Just this week, the House passed further legislation that would delay by two years some key provisions of Dodd-Frank. “[Banks] want to be able to do things their way, and that’s very dangerous.” MIT economist Simon Johnson tells Bill.
“Marcus Stanley, policy director of Americans for Financial Reform, which backs tougher regulation of Wall Street, said banks and their Republican allies were seeking to chip away at Dodd-Frank with a series of piecemeal delays and limits on regulatory authority. ‘The strategy is to take many of these bills and amendments and combine them together into packaged legislation. In combination, these so-called technical fixes will very significantly undermine Dodd-Frank and make it impossible to effectively police the financial sector,’ he said.”
If federal regulations and ethical standards for pension fund asset managers are to have “any meaning,” the Department of Labor must not give Credit Suisse a waiver, say AFR and the AFL-CIO in a joint statement.
Don’t open the floodgates to a wave of “wrong number” calls to cell phones, say AFR, NCLC and more than 75 national and state groups in a letter urging the FCC to stand by the safeguards of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
“The financial industry has been methodical, drafting technically complicated legislation that can pass the heavily Republican House with a few Democratic votes. And then, once approved, Wall Street has pushed to tack such measures on to larger bills considered too important for the White House to block. ‘This all works together: Put it up for stand-alone vote, get some Democrats on it, and then when you push it onto a must-pass bill, say it’s a bipartisan bill that’s already passed,’ said Marcus Stanley, policy director of Americans for Financial Reform.
AFR sent an updated letter to members of Congress, urging them to oppose HR 37, “Promoting Job Creation and Reducing Small Business Burdens Act.” This legislation includes numerous changes that could have significant negative impacts on regulators ability to police the financial markets so that they function safely and transparently.
A senior House Democrat, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), moved today to put the idea of a Wall Street transaction tax firmly on the table of the national policy debate. Rep. Van Hollen’s proposal – along with a swift statement of support from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) – is excellent news. AFR also strongly supports a second element of Van Hollen’s plan, which would sharply limit the tax deductability of corporate pay above $1 million.
AFR sent a letter to members of Congress, urging them to oppose HR 185, the “Regulatory Accountability Act.” This legislation would hamstring agencies charged with the oversight of our largest banks by requiring them to comply with a host of additional bureaucratic and procedural requirements designed to make effective action virtually impossible.
“PNC, the nation’s 10th largest bank, hasn’t spent the past few years just building itself into a financial behemoth. Like many other banks, it’s built up political capital too. And last year, it spent some of that currency to help roll back a regulation [that] barred banks with federally insured deposits from engaging in certain potentially high-risk financial transactions… Swaps have legitimate uses, but ‘when things go wrong in this area, they go very very wrong,’ said Marcus Stanley [of] Americans for Financial Reform.”