Biden administration efforts to address challenges created by medical debt, highlighted at a White House meeting today, will curb its harmful impacts, including distorted credit reports and abusive collection practices. The impacts are a widespread problem for millions of people, but disproportionately harm communities of color.
The 2024 Private Equity Climate Risks Scorecard studied 21 private equity firms that manage $6 trillion worth of companies, and found that two-thirds of the energy companies in their portfolios are invested in fossil fuels, using hundreds of millions of dollars from pension funds. Their gigaton of carbon emissions is over three times as much as from the energy used to power all the homes in America and exceeds those of the global aviation industry.
Problems are brewing in a scheme that is bigger than the Australian economy and almost completely without federal oversight. It is called private credit — large scale lending, but not by banks — and has surged from less than $300 billion in loans in 2013 to over $2.1 trillion globally today. This unregulated market has become yet another tool for the private equity industry to pursue leveraged buyouts and leaves target companies on the hook to repay the new mountains of debt. If this large pool of unregulated loans go sour, the distress could spread into the broader financial system, including traditional banks, and pose systemic risk to the financial system.
“Congress should pressure Postmaster General DeJoy and the USPS Board of Governors to reverse course, and instead of another mail slow down, reinstate the 2012 mail delivery service standards. They must not stray even one step away from USPS’s universal service obligation: to deliver the mail to everyone, in every ZIP code. USPS is a public service for all, and a lifeline for many, especially rural America.”
The just-filed Department of Justice lawsuit against Visa marks a necessary, but not the only, step needed to challenge the anticompetitive practices by the credit card and payment processing company that penalize consumers and restrains robust competition.
New report providing a snapshot of how every member of Congress voted on consumer protections, climate financial regulation, Wall Street, and financial industry legislative measures during the first session of the 118th Congress.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued final guidance that outlines the terms and conditions that should be considered by designated contract markets (“DCMs”) when they list voluntary carbon credit (“VCC”) derivative contracts. The CFTC has rightly acknowledged the serious transparency and integrity challenges in the underlying, unregulated VCC market, but the guidance alone cannot prevent fraud and manipulation.
AFREF submitted comments to the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice on serial acquisitions and roll-up strategies and their impact on competition, the market, workers, consumers, and communities. Decades of unchecked mergers, driven largely by private equity, have consolidated economic power and raised consumer prices, suppressed workers’ wages, undermined the ability to form and sustain small businesses, and sapped vitality from our communities. These negative impacts have disproportionately harmed people of color, women, and people with limited English proficiency as individuals, families, and communities.
The bills coerce financial actors to ignore critical environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risks in investment decisions. This approach can only benefit corporate boards and fossil fuel interests at the expense of workers, investors, and long-term sustainability.
Natalia Renta, senior policy counsel, Americans for Financial Reform: “Taxes are a very big issue. The Trump tax cuts were a significant giveaway to big corporations and billionaires and Wall Street. We’re standing very close to a tax fight in 2025 and we’ll be having a big fight about what type of country we want to live in and whether corps and wall street should pay their fair share or whether public servants and teachers should pay a higher tax rate.”