Americans for Financial Reform warmly welcomes the news that Richard Cordray has been appointed to be the COO of Federal Student Aid (FSA) at the Department of Education. Cordray served as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) inaugural director for six years, and the Bureau quickly became a powerful force for good.
Executive Director Lisa Donner testified at Senate Banking’s hearing “The Dignity of Work.”
AFR joined a letter to the Small Business Administration calling for the release of data pertaining to Paycheck Protection Program recipients’ loan forgiveness requests, which represents $194.5 billion of taxpayer money, most of which has already been forgiven. The letter urges the SBA to release the number of jobs borrowers supported with PPP funds, information on any pay reductions experienced by workers employed by borrowers, whether the borrower applied for or received a second draw PPP loan, among other important data points.
AFR joined a letter calling on Congress to update the FTC’s enforcement tools under the FTC Act, Section 13(b).
Legislation, proposed by Sens. Van Hollen and Brown along with Rep. Chuy Garcia of Illinois would rescind the Trump-era rule and reestablish states’ right to protect their residents with interest rate caps.
In a rare form of bipartisan agreement, a group of 25 Attorneys General (AGs) sent a letter today to Congressional leadership urging it to “use the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to rescind the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s (OCC’s) “True Lender” rule in order to “safeguard states’ fundamental sovereign rights to protect their citizens from financial abuse.”
AFREF joined our partners in sending a letter calling on the OCC to carefully scrutinize new partnerships between risky Income Share Agreement companies and banks under OCC supervision. Partnerships like the one between Mentorworks and Blue Ridge Bank have the potential to put borrowers at risk by opening the market to a product that is violating the law & harming borrowers.
AFREF and 17 organizations sent a letter in response to FHFA’s RFI on climate and natural risk management detailing our concerns about the disproportionate impact of climate change and natural disasters on borrowers and communities of color and low and moderate income neighborhoods. We provided recommendations for next steps on FHFA’s work on mitigating climate risk and urged FHFA to make sure climate risk mitigation efforts do not cause inadvertent harm to the communities who are already most vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change and who face the most challenges in accessing and sustaining homeownership.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced the appointment of John Morton as Climate Counselor at the Department. In March, Public Citizen and Americans for Financial Reform issued a blueprint for using financial regulatory tools in response to the climate crisis: Climate
AFR and the Main Street Alliance hosted the third webinar in the event series “Small Business Needs In The Biden Administration” on April 15, 2021. The panel, “Increasing Access to Capital for Black Small Businesses,” was moderated by AFR Advocacy Director Rion Dennis.