In late May, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) under Trump-appointee and acting director Russell Vought launched a newly redesigned website that deprioritized consumer complaints and reframed the CFPB as a deregulatory agency rather than the nation’s only financial watchdog focused on protecting consumers in the market. As part of this overhaul, the Trump-Vought CFPB […]
The undersigned organizations, with cumulative membership and affiliation of over 500,000 Californians, denounce California Insurance Commissioner Lara’s recent rollback which will effectively incapacitate the Prop 103 Consumer Insurance Intervenor Program by making it harder for consumer intervenors to engage and fund their efforts to challenge rate hikes. This insurance industry giveaway will result in less public input on insurance rate setting which will mean people pay higher insurance costs across the state. The next Insurance Commissioner must reverse course.
This is a resource for institutional investors, including pension trustees, seeking to better understand what recent turmoil in private credit could mean for their portfolios. Private credit refers broadly to privately negotiated loans originated by nonbank financial companies like private funds (often managed by big-name private equity firms) and other asset managers. These loans are […]
Insurance commissioners have varying levels of authority over pricing across different states, ranging from significant authority to deny insurance companies’ rate increase requests if they are excessive or inadequate, to being able to enforce compliance only after insurance companies set their own rates, to having no meaningful authority to review and reject rates at all.
State insurance commissioners and legislators play a critical role in determining the insurance premiums people pay for their home insurance.[1] Insurance companies have increased homeowners insurance premiums by an average of 24 percent from 2021 to 2024 nationwide.[2] Premium rates are rising far faster in many places across the country including in a geographically diverse […]
Growing Wall Street control of single family homes is a contributor to our housing crisis, with mega single-family investors (those who own more than 1,000 homes nationwide) controlling an estimated 446,000 homes as of January 2025. Nationally, the presence of corporate landlords in a community has been associated with raised rents, junk fees, reduced maintenance, and increased evictions.
Recent research reveals that homeowners with lower credit scores or who live in neighborhoods of color are often charged more for property insurance coverage even when the disaster risks they face are comparable to those paying less for insurance. As climate risk grows, borrowers perceived by insurance companies as having riskier credit characteristics could be disproportionally burdened by higher insurance costs that undermine their financial stability.
On the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, AFR/AFREF’s Associate Director of Housing Policy Caroline Nagy joined a webinar, “Katrina at 20: Climate Capital, Injustice, and the Path Forward,” hosted by Manley Consulting Group, The Horizon Project, Hip Hop Caucus, and Majority Action.
Private equity firms have poured record amounts into the data center sector, snapping up billions of dollars’ worth of digital real estate. Private equity has spent nearly $200 billion to finance data center deals, with the vast majority of this spending hidden from public view. Private equity was behind nearly 80 to 90 percent of completed mergers and acquisitions in the sector since 2022.