The AFR Education Fund sent a statement for the record to the House Financial Services Committee concerning Facebook’s proposal for the Libra digital token and payment system. The statement describes ways in which Facebook is attempting to create an unregulated financial product of potentially global scale and the dangers this would pose to the users of the token and the broader financial system.
Join us on May 21st for an analysis and discussion of the important developments in the regulation and supervision on big banks, and their effects on financial security and economic stability. View the details here, or below.
Letter from 80 groups opposing the CFPB’s changes to its no-action letter policy and new sandbox proposal
On the first anniversary of the Trump administration, the Take on Wall Street coalition catalogs the ways that Wall Street made bank on Trump in 2017.
“The burden of interpreting financial services jargon and communicating with lenders and servicers should not rest solely on borrowers. . . . Expanding access to language services throughout the mortgage process would begin to equalize a system that currently undermines the ability of LEP borrowers to understand the complexities of their future homeownership prospects and to protect their home after purchasing it.”
“…The essence of SoFi’s application is a request to seek the benefits of federal deposit insurance without subjecting SoFi itself or its private equity owners to the well-founded requirements for bank holding companies. The FDIC should not approve the application to facilitate this regulatory arbitrage. …If its application is granted, SoFi will be the first new ILC to secure deposit insurance in over a decade. That will send a clear signal to the marketplace that the FDIC intends once again to approve ILC deposit insurance applications. FDIC should not grant SoFi’s application and allow the ILC loophole to be revived.”
“H.R. 10, the ‘Financial CHOICE Act’… would be better dubbed ‘Wall Street’s CHOICE Act,’ as it would have a devastating effect on the ability of regulators to protect consumers and investors from Wall Street exploitation and the economy from financial risks created by too-big-to-fail megabanks. It would expose consumers, investors, and the public to greatly heightened risk of abuse in their regular dealings with the financial system, and our economy as a whole to a far greater risk of instability and crisis.”
“…We urged the Commission to be more aggressive in laying out structural reforms to the markets and more specific limits on dangerous automated trading practices. The current Supplemental NPRM does not change our basic assessment, as it maintains the basic framework of the 2015 NPRM, with no movement toward additional specificity in risk limits or risk control requirements or reduced discretion for market actors in designing and implementing risk controls…
“Small businesses are a primary driver of job growth and wealth creation in the United States, providing more than half the country’s jobs and two-thirds of net new jobs. …There is a strong and growing consensus that small businesses should have stronger federal protections in the financial marketplace. …The best agency to oversee protections for small businesses is the CFPB. The CFPB is the primary enforcer of the core statutes that protect borrowers and other users of financial services against misconduct.”
“Rep. Hensarling’s revisions to his Wall Street’s CHOICE Act will make a disastrous bill even worse…This legislation doesn’t just repeal huge swaths of the Dodd-Frank Act – it makes regulators even weaker than they were before the financial crisis.”