AFR shared maps and statistics on climate change’s impact on homeowners insurance in Nebraska’s first congressional district with the House Financial Services Committee’s Housing and Insurance Subcommittee.
Patrick Woodall, managing director for policy at Americans for Financial Reform, said slashing the research office would cut off “unique modeling and monitoring tools” that are critical to understanding where risk is building up in the financial system, from banks, private credit or other corners of the market.
The rhetoric is about “tightening our belts and austerity, but the reality is that the impact is not mostly budgetary,” he said. “The impact is overwhelmingly about our ability to actually monitor the financial system for growing risk that poses potentially very serious impacts on the economy.”
AFREF sent a letter to the CFPB opposing proposed rescissions that would create blanket confidentiality for all CFPB orders and decisions about non-bank supervisory determinations that would strip away transparency for some of the riskiest and least regulated nonbank financial products.
AFREF sent a letter to the CFPB opposing its proposal to rescind a repeat offender database of nonbank enforcement and agency orders. This will help state and federal regulators, advocates, and the public identify repeat offenders and more easily spot patterns and practices of misconduct.
The GENIUS Act (S.1528) took another step closer to becoming law after the Senate cleared a key procedural vote towards passing this alarming bill that links crypto tokens purportedly pegged to the U.S. dollar – stablecoins – to the broader financial system without meaningful consumer protections or safeguards for investors. This bill also stands to enrich President Trump and his family personally via their many crypto business ventures.
Yesterday, a majority of members of the House Financial Services and Agriculture Committees voted to approve H.R. 3633, the so-called CLARITY Act, a bill written by and for the crypto industry that will reward predatory and exploitative crypto business models and leave consumers, communities, and investors with weak protections and little recourse when the next speculative crypto bubble inevitably bursts.
“If (stablecoin issuers) have to move those Treasuries quickly, or the market demands that, it could create some credit crunches there,” said Mark Hays, associate director for cryptocurrency and financial technology at Americans for Financial Reform. Hays said this assumes that stablecoins become more widely used after legislation passes.
The Republican Congress has proposed severe budget cuts to the CFPB that prevents the agency from fulfilling its statutory mandates to protect people. The attempt to shut down the CFPB protects powerful banks, predatory lenders, and tech billionaires instead of standing up for people all to help pay for tax cuts for the rich.
Americans for Financial Reform endorses Rep. Green’s “Systemic Risk Authority Transparency Act” that would require banking agencies to report any future uses of the systemic risk exception under the Federal Deposit Insurance Act.
AFR and 30 civil rights, labor, community, consumer protection, and economic justice organizations sent a letter calling on the Senate to swiftly act to defend the statutorily mandated independence of financial regulators in the face of unprecedented attacks and firings of commissioners and board members.