Tag Archives: Wall Street

Blog: Wall Street Lobby Surfaces New Nonsensical Legal Claim Over CFPB Funding

Last month the Supreme Court delivered a crushing defeat to Wall Street’s challenge to funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Undeterred, Wall Street is now trying to distort the Supreme Court’s decision to conjure up a new and utterly nonsensical argument about the legality of the CFPB’s funding. The trial balloon for this argument was launched in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by Hal Scott, a retired Harvard Law professor and longtime industry shill whose specialty is neither consumer nor constitutional issues but international finance. Scott’s notion has already been swatted down by several credentialed legal experts of various political stripes.

News Release: Labor Department’s Final Retirement Security Rules Will Help Protect the Savings of All Americans From Adviser Conflicts of Interest

Members of the Save Our Retirement coalition, along with a diverse collection of more than 60 consumer, retirement, and labor groups, today commended the Department of Labor (DOL) for issuing final rules designed to protect Americans from the harmful effects of conflicts of interest when financial advisers provide retirement investment advice: The rules will require all financial professionals who provide retirement investment advice to put the best interests of their clients ahead of what’s best for their own pockets.  This commonsense requirement is long overdue and promises to be a major improvement over the status quo, which allows too many financial professionals and firms to offer self-serving retirement advice at the expense of workers and retirement savers.

In The News: How Should Federal Regulators Respond to the Capital One-Discover Deal (American Banker)

Alexa Philo and Patrick Woodall of Americans for Financial Reform: “Picture a new megabank with all the advantages and dangers of a too-big-to-fail institution. Now imagine it had the market power to bully merchants through its ownership of a payment network for debit and credit cards. Finally, throw in a track record of gouging its own customers. That’s exactly what we will have if Capital One succeeds in taking over Discover Financial Services.”

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Analysis: Antitrust and Banking Agencies Must Block Capital One-Discover Merger

The $35 billion takeover bid would vault Capital One into 6th place among the biggest U.S. banks and create the largest U.S. credit card lender, ahead of current leader JPMorgan Chase. This new company could raise prices for cardholders, especially lower-income consumers and Black and Latine households and give Capital One the power to jack up debit card fees on merchants. In short, it would reinforce the megabank monopoly power that is already a serious problem in the American economy. The Biden administration must stand up for consumers, communities, and small businesses and block the Capital One-Discover merger.

Letter to Regulators: Strong Basel Capital Standards Support Growth

The bank lobby is spending vast lobbying dollars to cloak themselves in the mantle of preserving access to credit. But the truth that the banks avoid debating is that the overwhelming impact of higher bank capital is – by design – to restrict how risky and how big the more speculative aspects of their business, notably their trading and investment bank operations can grow.

Letters to Regulators: Letter to Treasury, OCC, FRB and FDIC on the Need to Fight Bank Consolidation

The President has made it clear: it’s time to fight consolidation, not facilitate it. In reviewing lessons learned from this most recent banking crisis to better prevent the next one, the regulators must be full-throated and clear in their affirmation that robust regulation and competition, not consolidation, will lead to a healthier, safer, and more vibrant financial system. Banks must exist to serve the needs of the American people, not the other way around – and it is regulators’ critical task to ensure so. 

News Release: Famous Last Words – What the Bank CEOs Told Congress in 2018 to Get Deregulation

As the former CEOs of failed banks prepare to testify before Congress, consider the self-serving statements that bank executives, lobbyists and lawmakers uttered to grease passage of banking deregulation legislation in 2018. “SVB, like our mid-sized bank peers, does not present systemic risks,” Greg Becker, the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank insisted, about five years before federal authorities declared his bank a systemic risk.