The Federal Reserve Bank of New York announced the initial composition of the index they will be using to purchase corporate bonds through its Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF). The corporations included in their June 5 “Broad Market Index” raise serious concerns about public benefit, solvency, and further incentivizing companies to take on additional debt unnecessarily.
In place of a heartless free market of panicked investors who might want to cut their losses and sell, the plan is to simulate real buying and selling of financial products like mortgages and bonds with directed deployments of the Fed’s endless trillions. And they will be endless … Marcus Stanley of Americans for Financial Reform said, “The Fed’s perspective on this is, they want to create normalcy.” But what does “normal” mean in an economy that may be changed forever?
At the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, big banks will be paying some $13 billion in shareholder dividends. If this level of dividends continues for the rest of 2020, big banks could be permitted to pay out over $50 billion in dividends for 2020.
Apart from the obvious fact that this is a public health crisis and should be treated as such, we should all be immensely skeptical of any suggestion from Wall Street that it needs a bailout or any kind of assistance. We need to help people, not profits.
“We are in a much more fragile situation than we should be because the regulators haven’t been on the job,” said Marcus Stanley, policy director for Americans for Financial Reform. “This is a real economic crisis we’re facing.”
In August regulators issued a rule that dramatically weakened the Volcker Rule limits on direct proprietary trading by banks. Today, they have proposed new changes that would greatly weaken restrictions on banks taking risks through ownership of external funds, including venture capital funds and securitization vehicles like collateralized debt obligations.
AFR held a day-long convening of experts to discuss emerging issues in the SEC regulation of registered investment companies (mutual funds and Exchange Traded Funds that are registered under the 1940 Act).
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund raised concerns over weakening resolution planning requirements intended to prepare large bank holding companies for an orderly resolution in conventional bankruptcy without risk to financial stability and without any reliance on extraordinary public support of the failed bank or its counterparties.
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund sent a letter to banking regulators opposing a proposal that would make the resolution planning process substantially less stringent than it currently is, and raising concerns over the safety and soundness of individual banks and the effect on U.S. financial stability.
Today’s financial stability report from the Federal Reserve clearly documents that we are at or near the peak of an economic cycle, with inflated asset prices and strong lending growth leading to signs of excessive leverage in the corporate sector. The peak of the cycle is the time to strengthen financial safeguards, not weaken them.