In a 52-47 vote last night, the U.S. Senate voted to overturn a Trump administration regulation that would allow predatory lenders to evade state interest rate laws by putting a bank’s name on the paperwork.
“The House must now move swiftly to join the Senate and prevent any more rent-a-bank schemes from taking root in the 45 states that cap or otherwise regulate interest rates,” said Linda Jun, senior policy counsel for Americans for Financial Reform.
AFREF, NCLC, and NHLP submitted detailed comments to the CFPB urging the Bureau to strengthen its make necessary improvements to its COVID loss mitigation proposal to protect the most vulnerable borrowers and strengthen protections against foreclosures.
AFR submitted a comment letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission urging the Commission not to approve any additional leveraged ETF based on the Chicago Board of Exchange (CBOE) Volatility Index of the S&P 500 (“VIX”). The letter raises important concerns about not only the
AFREF and 41 organizations sent comments in response to the CFPB’s proposed COVID loss mitigation rule urging the Bureau to make critical improvements to help avoid unnecessary foreclosures and to facilitate streamlined solutions for borrowers facing COVID-19 hardships that will make it possible for them to keep their homes and provide them with the stability they need to recover and rebuild.
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund wrote the Fed to express concerns over the blow-up of the Archegos family fund. This incident reveals both the dangers of excessive leverage at private funds, and the failure of banking regulators, including the Federal Reserve, to properly regulate bank interactions with such funds. To address these issues, the Federal Reserve must investigate its own regulatory failures in this case and publicly disclose the lessons learned from this investigation, and must also work with the Financial Stability Oversight Council to address the risks of excessive leverage at private funds.
AFREF joined a letter to the Department of Labor detailing ways to improve protections for retail investors.
AFREF joined a letter to the CFPB requesting they prohibit credit reporting of rent arrears incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic
In February, a letter sent to the House Financial Services Committee by the progressive non-profit Americans for Financial Reform called on Congress to expand the blank-cheque company definition and amend securities law to exclude SPAC mergers from liability protections. “As long as there’s money to be made in every part of the SPAC issuance process, I don’t expect to see changes unless you start to see some more scrutiny,” says Andrew Park, senior policy analyst at AFR.
Advocates welcomed reports that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen plans to appoint a new acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), replacing Blake Paulson, in light of the highly deceptive and false claims that the agency, under Paulson’s leadership, put forward as Congress debates overturning the OCC’s “fake lender” rule.