“We don’t believe that this is enough,” Marcus Stanley of Americans for Financial Reform told the Washington Post. “Raising $60 billion in extra capital is helpful, but it’s really not in line with the kinds of risk we saw in the financial crisis.”
“’There are provisions in this bill that would effectively unwind a good deal of the work the CFTC has already done and make it much harder for them to regulate the derivatives markets,’ Marcus Stanley, policy director for Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition including the AFL-CIO labor federation, said in a phone interview.”
AFR submitted a comment to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau offering some suggestions on how to strengthen their proposed rule on defining “larger participants” in the international money transfer market. This proposed rule, if adopted, would be the fourth in a series of rulemakings to define ‘larger participants’ in various consumer financial product markets. AFR’s recommendations include expanding the criteria CFPB uses to define larger participants, and covering domestic as well as international money transfers under their supervisory purview.
AFR, AFSCME, and the SEIU today sent the letter below to the Securities and Exchange Commission calling on the Commission to reproprose and strengthen its rules governing credit rating agencies. Conflicts of interest and deceptive practices at credit rating agencies were central to the 2008 financial crisis and continue to pose a threat to the economy today.
AFR and more than 100 consumer, civil rights, labor and community organizations submitted a letter to the CFPB urging the Bureau to issue a strong rule to address unfair, deceptive or abusive practices in the payday and small dollar loan market.
Americans for Financial Reform and the more than 100 undersigned consumer, civil rights, labor and community organizations write to urge the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to issue a strong rule to address unfair, deceptive or abusive practices in the payday and small dollar loan market. In particular, it is essential that any rule encompass the longer-term, multi-payment products that are already evolving in an attempt to evade expected CFPB rules.
The Commodities Futures Trading Commission is one of the critical agencies in financial regulation. The Dodd-Frank Act gave the CFTC responsibility for overseeing the vast and previously unregulated financial derivatives markets that helped crash the world economy in 2008. This increase in responsibilities led to an eight-fold growth in the size of the markets that the CFTC was responsible for, yet the CFTC’s funding is completely inadequate to fulfill its new oversight responsibilities.
Tuesday Mar. 20: Capitol Hill briefing sponsored by Americans for Financial Reform, Center for Responsible Lending, Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety, NAACP, National Association of Consumer Advocates, National Consumer Law Center and National Council of La Raza.
“Surveys show high levels of voter support for tougher rules; apart from the Senate’s confirmation of two notable regulatory officials, however, most of last year’s congressional votes on such matters were over efforts to reverse or water down reforms already enacted into law. And while some legislators resisted those efforts and continued to press for more industry accountability, many others – particularly in the House – threw their weight behind a series of proposals to weaken existing rules or to undermine the agencies charged with implementing them.”
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s latest report on payday lending reaffirms what the Bureau’s initial research showed a year ago: these ultra-high-cost loans, while promoted as a form of emergency credit, consistently lead to a cycle of debt. Even after paying substantial fees, many borrowers end up “owing as much or more on their very last loan as the entire amount they had borrowed initially,” CFPB Director Richard Cordray pointed out.