Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress joined other consumer advocacy and public interest organizations in sending a letter to Congress expressing opposition to a proposed bill intended to create a market regulatory structure for digital assets.
We are thrilled to announce that today, our Senior Policy Analyst, Alexa Philo was a panelist during a Bipartisan Policy Center business discussion on Bank Capital with the Federal Reserve Vice Chair, Michael Barr.
Washington, D.C. – The Biden administration and Congress should use all available means to curb the increasingly harmful effects of private equity’s control of massive swaths of the healthcare sector, according to a new report from Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund.
From A for Ambulance to Z for Zamboni, this book takes the reader on an alphabetical journey through the myriad ways that private equity has encroached into most parts of everyday life.
AFR opposes a series of legislative proposals that have recently been approved by House committees, and, in some cases, by the full House of Representatives, and that seek to amend the federal securities laws in ways that would be harmful to investors. Some of the House proposals directly weaken regulatory oversight and threaten investor protection, while others seek to alter policy in a more subtle or incremental fashion.
Washington, D.C. — Briefs filed by the payday lending lobby and John Eastman, the lawyer who tried to help former President Trump overturn the 2020 election, highlight the extremely weak legal case that this predatory industry has against the funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a vital federal agency that polices the financial services market on behalf of everyday people.
“Cox compares the restrictions on bank M&A with the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, first developed as a way to calculate concentration in the airline industry,” said Alex Philo, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform. “The Department of Justice allows this to go up to 2,500 in other sectors, says Cox, but for banks, the limit works out at 1,800, and an acquisition can cause a bank’s index to jump by 200 points.”
A 2022 research memo from Americans for Financial Reform, a nonpartisan nonprofit coalition, found that private equity firms are now landlords to at least 1.6 million families across the United States. This figure is likely an underestimate.
Americans for Financial Reform submitted a statement for the record to the House Financial Services Committee in response to the Committee’s June 13 hearing on digital assets, entitled, “The Future of Digital Assets: Providing Clarity for the Digital Asset Ecosystem.”
AFREF, the AFL-CIO, Communications Workers of America, the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, and Public Citizen submitted a comment letter in support of the SEC’s proposal to modernize beneficial ownership reporting in response to a new memorandum by the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis.