The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s new guidance on overdraft fees linked to ATM and one-time debit card transactions will help curtail predatory junk fees that obscure accurate pricing on bank services. The CFPB’s new guidelines can reduce the likelihood that overdraft services flout the law and prevent people from being charged illegal fees.
AFR-EF submitted comments on the HUD’s Single Family Home Sale Program in support of improved borrower protections for homeowners impacted by FHA note sales. AFR-EF also called on the FHA to change practices that allow private equity and other corporate landlords access to large note pools, highlighting the negative impacts on homeowners and their neighborhoods.
Today, the Justice Department released a new approach to bank merger enforcement that brings the woefully outdated bank merger guidelines into the 21st century. The Justice Department announced that it would apply the greatly improved overall merger guidelines, which were released in 2023, to bank mergers as well. The bank merger rules that are currently in place date from the era of dial-up modems and are totally insufficient to address the complex market power issues posed by many proposed bank mergers — including the pending Capital One-Discover merger.
AFR led a coalition of 39 partner organizations in a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries opposing H.R. 4790 and H.R. 5339. These bills are part of a broader campaign against common sense investment practices and would undermine workers’ retirement security, weaken corporate accountability, and compromise the integrity of our financial system. The coalition urges Congress to reject these bills, which favor corporate interests at the expense of workers, investors, and the public.
The lone DeFi sceptic on the witness panel, Mark Allen Hays — a senior policy analyst with consumer advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform — agreed that security issues plague DeFi projects. But “the problem goes deeper,” he said, adding that many hacks are inside jobs set up by the founders themselves. These could be addressed by existing rules under US securities regulation, he said, which demands disclosures from regulated entities.
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Powell, you should recuse yourself from the consideration of the Basel III Endgame regulatory capital rule to preserve the integrity of Federal Reserve regulatory decision-making and avoid the appearance of impropriety that would undermine public perception of the central bank’s independence and impartiality. Meeting with big bank CEOs in secret creates the appearance that powerful regulated entities cannot merely influence rulemaking during the public notice and comment period and through their policy arguments, but that they can meet off the record and set regulatory red lines which federal authorities will not cross.
Dimon’s tactic was to argue that inflation—Powell’s foremost worry during the past three years—would get worse if the rule took effect, because banks would have to raise the cost of borrowing to pay for the increase in capital reserves. Mortgages and small-business loans would be smaller. Pensions and college funds would produce lower returns. The price of a soda would increase. But as the nonprofit Americans for Financial Reform noted in a comment on the rule, “Banks could very easily raise their current capital levels by simply retaining more earnings, which are plentiful right now, instead of buying back shares or paying dividends.”
As the focus on the American voter intensifies with the coming election, a new poll released today shows voters across the political spectrum overwhelmingly support the mission of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), financial regulation generally, and a variety of specific CFPB actions, including efforts to limit credit card late fees, reduce overdraft charges, and prohibit medical debt from appearing on credit reports.
BlackRock and Vanguard, the world’s two largest asset managers, voted against a shareholder proposal requesting an independent audit of Amazon’s notoriously dangerous warehouse working conditions for the third year in a row, according to recently-disclosed proxy voting data. This vote reflects a troubling pattern of powerful asset managers using their immense power over public companies to stand in the way of shareholder efforts to force corporate boards and executives to address very real financial risks.
“This is an example of corporate monopoly power. They exert a certain price — really, any price that they want — and the parents are at the corporations’ mercy to pay that price,” said Christine Chen Zinner, senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform, a pro-consumer advocacy group. “They have no choices.”