Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund (AFREF) led a letter with 16 additional signatories urging the SEC to propose a rule requiring public companies to make human capital management disclosures as soon as possible. Investors are in desperate need of consistent, comparable, and decision-useful workforce information.
Americans for Financial Reform today wrote to the House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security, Illicit Finance, and International Financial Institutions urging members to rely on existing authority by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in order to gain more transparency into the $5 trillion private markets (“exempt offerings” under SEC Rule 144A and Reg D) to address national security concerns.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) should continue to prioritize investor protections that guard against the fraudulent behavior endemic to the crypto industry by rejecting applications for Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), according to Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund.
The Securities and Exchange Commission should re-propose its rule on disclosures of stock buybacks as soon as possible now that the unreasonably tight deadline for a court-mandated revision of the rule has passed. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, alleging “defects” in a rule designed to bring transparency to stock buybacks, gave the SEC 30 days to revise the rule – an impossibly short time frame it then refused to extend upon the SEC’s request. The ruling came in response to a lawsuit by the Chamber of Commerce.
Washington, D.C. – New investor protections announced today by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have the potential to curb widespread practices that have allowed Wall Street’s $25 trillion private fund industry to harvest tens of billions in fees at the expense of public pensions, retirees, and other savers – all to the advantage of some of the richest people in the world.
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund submitted a comment to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) supporting its proposal to prohibit conflicts of interest in securitizations. Such conflicts were at the heart of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 leading to trillions of dollars in losses across the financial system and irreparable harm to millions of homeowners. Now, with the growth in securitizations such as those backed by commercial real estate and other assets, the SEC’s proposals can ensure that similar practices do not happen again at the harm of investors and others.
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund and 12 other signers submitted a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission reiterating the need for the SEC to finalize a strong set of rules to better protect investors in private funds, which include hedge funds and private equity.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) today finalized a plan to bring long-overdue transparency to the practice of companies buying back their own stock. However, the final rule weakened key aspects of the initial proposal.
AFREF, the Institute for Policy Studies, Global Economy Project, and Public Citizen led a letter with 22 additional signatories to the agencies tasked with implementing section 956 of Dodd-Frank. That section tasked six agencies with promulgating regulations to prevent incentive-based executive compensation that encourages “inappropriate risk” by May 2011. Almost 12 years later, we don’t have a final rule. The letter was sent to regulators ahead of congressional hearings that will examine recent bank failures.
AFREF led a letter with 29 signers to the Securities and Exchange Commission reiterating the important need to pass a strong set of final rules related to requiring private fund advisers to disclose a complete breakdown of fees/expenses, assumptions used to calculate returns, and the existence of side letters to investors.
The letter is also urging the SEC to finalize a strong set of rules related to requiring private fund advisers over a certain size to report more detailed information about their holdings confidentially to the SEC so that the SEC and other financial regulatory agencies have much greater insight into the risks in the $21 trillion private fund space where there is currently little visibility in order to better safeguard the financial system.