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.
Increasing the tax on corporate stock buybacks encourages investments in the real economy, discourages excessive executive compensation that widens economic inequality, and raises funds to protect healthcare, nutrition, and other programs that help working families. Raising the buybacks tax to 4 percent would generate $166 billion in revenue over the next decade, and encourage companies to reinvest in workers and innovation instead of inflating their share prices and juicing executive compensation.
AFR shared maps and statistics with the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee prior to two hearings this month on the insurance crisis, which is compounded by climate change.
In its first 100 days, the Trump administration moved aggressively to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), leaving the public vulnerable to predation by Wall Street, Big Tech, and predatory lenders, and satisfying the financial industry’s desire to operate without oversight. Elon Musk declared war on the CFPB, and the Republican-majority in Congress has largely aligned with the administration’s efforts to tear apart the CFPB.
AFR published a policy memo outlining how climate change represents an imminent financial and economic threat, including statistics around increasingly costly disasters, rising uninsured losses, eroding real estate values, ballooning consumer debt, and food price inflation.
Small businesses and farms are engines for economic growth and household wealth building, but historic inequitable access to credit and financing makes it more difficult for businesses and farms owned by people of color and women to sustain, reinvest, and expand their businesses. Section 1071 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act requires the CFPB to collect data essential to identify lending discrimination and gaps in access to credit, provide market transparency, and address community credit needs for small businesses and farms. Efforts to repeal, weaken, or undermine Section 1071’s reporting requirements will hurt small businesses and farms, undermine household wealth building, and hurt overall economic growth.
Congress must vote against legislative attacks on the CFPB, which must remain independent, with a single director and a secure mandatory funding stream. Congress must also protect CFPB rules including the fintech payment app rule, the overdraft fee rule, the medical debt rule, and small business and farm lending transparency rules.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) overdraft fee rule will discourage financial institutions from abusive and predatory overdraft practices, which often target servicemembers and military families. Banks charge overdraft fees for covering transactions that exceed account balances, but these charges can be illegally or unfairly applied and overdraft fee revenue has become a major profit center for some institutions.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has finalized a rule allowing it to supervise larger nonbank companies that offer services like digital wallets and payment apps, also known as peer-to-peer or P2P apps. Supervision of these companies will make sure they comply with the law and do not facilitate fraud. Banks are already supervised for these same reasons, and this rule will level the playing field to make sure all payments are safe, whether offered by a bank or a nonbank company.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) new overdraft fee rule closes a paper-check era loophole that has promoted abusive practices and allowed the biggest banks to earn billions in profits off of the most vulnerable families. The rule will help everyone, but especially families that are struggling with high prices and making ends meet.