AFR letter sounds the alarm against HR 1003, which would undermine Dodd-Frank by more than doubling the number of cost-benefit analysis requirements imposed on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
“The giant financial institutions at the center of the economy are larger than ever, and still combine economically critical payment functions with complex and murky trading and brokerage activities.”
AFR joined public interest groups in signing onto two letters to Fifth Third Bank and Regions Financial Corporation calling on them to bring themselves in line with guidance from the federal regulators and discontinue their deposit advance products.
While many in Washington would rather stand pat or turn back the clock, Americans are strikingly united in wanting more financial reform, not less, according to a national survey of likely voters conducted this summer.
Consumer Action’s press release Consumers Union’s press release National Consumer Law Center’s press release
Congress will soon be back from recess – and back to gnashing its teeth over the budget and the various important things that, too many in that branch of government now contend, our country can no longer afford to do. They could expand their sense of the possible by considering a source of revenue they have so far largely ignored – a small tax on sales of stocks, bonds, and complex financial instruments.
Overseas affiliates of U.S. banks played a major role in the final meltdown of 2008-2009, at a cost of millions of jobs and trillions of dollars. Financial institutions must not be allowed to escape oversight by “off-shoring” their riskiest deals.
President Obama urged the nation’s top financial regulators on Monday to move faster on new rules for Wall Street, telling them in a private White House meeting that they must work to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis.
AFR and its member organizations warn against a proposal that would “severely weaken” the independence measures called for by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. “A Board dominated by employees of major banks and dealers with subsidiaries active in the municipal market will not be a truly independent Board.”
The banks did not get everything they wanted, according to Forbes. But, in AFR’s words, their foreign subsidiaries “will still be permitted to escape Dodd-Frank jurisdiction… for an inappropriately broad range of transactions.”