Few tax loopholes better exemplify how our rigged economy rewards wealth extraction over real work than the carried interest loophole. The controversial loophole exists to benefit some of the wealthiest people on Wall Street—especially private equity executives—at the expense of workers, communities, and the public.
As landlords, private equity firms raise rents, impose new fees, skimp on property maintenance and pursue tenants more aggressively in court, the Americans for Financial Reform research noted. “The cumulative effect is a massive transfer of wealth from mainly low- and middle-income renters, who can’t afford the onerous barriers to homeownership, to some of the wealthiest men in America,” it said.
The Stop Wall Street Looting Act of 2024 includes new measures to curb the growing power of private equity across the board and in key sectors of the economy like healthcare, and to penalize private equity firms and executives for their actions that harm a company and its workers even after they no longer control it. Lessons from the 2023 collapse of Steward Health Care, which stemmed from its 2010 buyout by private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, shaped the new provisions.
The 2024 Private Equity Climate Risks Scorecard studied 21 private equity firms that manage $6 trillion worth of companies, and found that two-thirds of the energy companies in their portfolios are invested in fossil fuels, using hundreds of millions of dollars from pension funds. Their gigaton of carbon emissions is over three times as much as from the energy used to power all the homes in America and exceeds those of the global aviation industry.
Problems are brewing in a scheme that is bigger than the Australian economy and almost completely without federal oversight. It is called private credit — large scale lending, but not by banks — and has surged from less than $300 billion in loans in 2013 to over $2.1 trillion globally today. This unregulated market has become yet another tool for the private equity industry to pursue leveraged buyouts and leaves target companies on the hook to repay the new mountains of debt. If this large pool of unregulated loans go sour, the distress could spread into the broader financial system, including traditional banks, and pose systemic risk to the financial system.
Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) wrote a letter to the House Financial Services Committee expressing our strong opposition to legislation that the House Financial Services Committee (HFSC) is scheduled to consider this week that would amend the federal securities laws in ways that could be profoundly damaging to American workers and “mom and pop” investors.
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.
The explosion of low-quality lending has brought debt loads in corporate America to record highs, a development that is likely to bring, in the coming years, a wave of defaults, slower growth, future job losses, and potential instability stemming from the utter opacity of this business. Despite the exponential growth in subprime corporate debt, our laws and regulations have not kept up, leaving policymakers and regulators in the dark as to the exact size of this market and where various risks may exist that could affect other financial institutions, companies, and their workers.
AFREF joined a letter responding to a request for information from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy about how federal agencies can better support collaboration with other levels of government, civil society, and the research community regarding the production and use of equitable data.
AFR joined a letter from a partner organization, Take Medicine Back, to the North Carolina attorney general about the role of private equity in the corporate practice of emergency medicine.