Americans for Financial Reform

Report Category: Fact Sheets

Wall Street Influence, By the Numbers

$1.4 MILLION…The amount that the finance industry is spending every day to influence Congress. $600 MILLION…The amount that the six big banks and their trade associations have spent on lobbying, trade association activity, and political contributions since the first major federal bailout of Bear Sterns in March 2008. 243…The number of government insiders turned lobbyists employed by

Summary of the SAFE Banking Act (a.k.a. Brown-Kaufman amendment)

Read FAQs about the SAFE Banking Act here – see page 3 (pdf). Our financial system has become dominated by institutions that are “too big to fail.” Moreover, as FDIC Chairman Bill Isaac has said, they are “too big to manage, and too big to regulate.” MIT professor Simon Johnson and James Kwak, a researcher