Washington, D.C. – A new report released today, “Banking Fair: The Promise and Urgency of Doing Postal Banking Right,” calls for a public banking option to be restored within the U.S. Postal Service. USPS has a long history as a public service institution, despite the seeds of privatization sown by Republican presidents and Congress since 1970.
AFR submitted this letter in opposition to H.R. 3564, which would make mortgages more expensive for many middle-class American families. H.R. 3564 would rescind the FHFA’s more equitable mortgage pricing framework and instead require the FHFA to increase fees for many first-time home buyers and those who do not have a 20% down payment.
“Blaming deposit insurance itself, however much the rescue of SVB depositors sticks in the craw, would be precisely the wrong reaction to this year’s crisis. The true injustice of the moment lies not in extending deposit insurance but in the paucity of obligations that bankers face in return,” AFR’s Communication Director, Carter Dougherty wrote.
Washington, D.C. – Hundreds of public interest groups, lawmakers, constitutional law scholars and more filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court this week in support of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in the case, CFPB v. CFSA, which the Supreme Court will review this fall.
Instead of having his most talented employees figuring out how to better serve customers or allocate credit to the real economy, Jamie Dimon has his best and brightest scheming how to evade tougher rules on bank capital that regulators are writing to make the financial system safer.
Americans for Financial Reform submitted today a statement for the record for the joint House Financial Services/Agriculture Committees’ subcommittee hearing on stablecoins entitled, “Putting the ‘Stable’ in ‘Stablecoins:’ How Legislation Will Help Stablecoins Achieve Their Promise.”
Consumer advocacy groups raise concerns about language in SAFE Banking Act that hampers regulators’ ability to stop fraud and prevent bad actors from gaining access to the banking system.
The Fifth Circuit’s radical and unprecedented decision in the case of CFPB vs. CFSA, if confirmed, would undermine the critical work carried out by the CFPB in protecting consumers and enforcing regulations on Wall Street and predatory lenders, according to an amicus brief filed by consumer advocates.
“We have to think much more deeply as a society about how we view housing and whose interests are worth protecting the most,” [Caroline] Nagy, [senior policy analyst at AFR] said. “Looking at our tax and finance policy and seeing that we’re incentivizing the exact opposite is a very difficult, problematic place to be in.”
As the former CEOs of failed banks prepare to testify before Congress, consider the self-serving statements that bank executives, lobbyists and lawmakers uttered to grease passage of banking deregulation legislation in 2018. “SVB, like our mid-sized bank peers, does not present systemic risks,” Greg Becker, the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank insisted, about five years before federal authorities declared his bank a systemic risk.