News Release: Court Sides with Students Over DeVos’s Pro-Corporate Agenda

Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund applauds the news that a court has rejected the for-profit college industry’s attempt to stop the 2016 Borrower Defense rule. Today, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia sided with students over Betsy Devos’s attempts to let abusive for profit schools rip them off with impunity.

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AFR Statement: Department of Education’s Proposed New Borrower Defense Rule Sacrifices Students to For-Profit Industry Greed

“The proposed Borrower Defense rule sacrifices students’ rights in order to line the pockets of executives at for-profit colleges, an industry that has shown time and again that it will use taxpayer dollars to deceive and defraud its own students.” said Alexis Goldstein, AFR’s Senior Policy Analyst. “With this rule and its extreme and absurd barriers to relief, Devos effectively tells students that if a school scams them, they’re on their own.”

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AFR Statement: Closing the CFPB’s Office for Students is like shuttering the fire department in the middle of a fire

“America is facing an ongoing student debt crisis, with outstanding student debt surpassing $1.5 trillion and over 8 million borrowers in default on their student loans. Closing the Office for Students is like shuttering the fire department in the middle of a three-alarm fire,” said Alexis Goldstein, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform.

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AFR Statement: Closing the CFPB’s Office for Students is like shuttering the fire department in the middle of a fire

“America is facing an ongoing student debt crisis, with outstanding student debt surpassing $1.5 trillion and over 8 million borrowers in default on their student loans. Closing the Office for Students is like shuttering the fire department in the middle of a three-alarm fire,” said Alexis Goldstein, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform.

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Letter to Regulators: AFR Calls on CFTC to Forcefully Regulate High-speed Automated Trading

“…We urged the Commission to be more aggressive in laying out structural reforms to the markets and more specific limits on dangerous automated trading practices. The current Supplemental NPRM does not change our basic assessment, as it maintains the basic framework of the 2015 NPRM, with no movement toward additional specificity in risk limits or risk control requirements or reduced discretion for market actors in designing and implementing risk controls…

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Letters to Regulators: Federal Reserve Commodity Proposal

“AFR strongly supports measures to both limit and control risks of physical commodity involvement at financial holding companies. …Specifically, we support the new consolidated limits on the total size of commodity holdings, the capital increase to 300 percent risk weights applied to commodities held under 4(k), and more…”

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AFR Statement: AFR Calls on SEC to Resist Industry Calls to Weaken Fund Derivatives Limits

We are deeply concerned that the Investment Company Institute (ICI) Letter lays out a set of changes to the Proposed Rule which wold effectively negate the derivatives exposure limits in the rule and render them useless as a tool for controlling speculative leverage at registered funds, as is required by the 1940 Act. …This change would not simply modify the relative weighting of derivatives exposures, but would result in a massive increase in the absolute limit on derivatives risk exposure.

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