US (AMERICANS FOR FINANCIAL REFORM) : WALL STREET deregulation is back. We’re exposing it.

 

Friend, At Americans for Financial Reform, part of our job is to sound the alarm before the damage is done. We educate members of Congress, their staff, regulators, policymakers across the country, the media, and the public about the financial risks that powerful institutions would rather keep buried. That’s why two AFR experts recently published important new pieces breaking down how regulators are weakening bank oversight, making it easier for large financial institutions to hide risk, and advancing a broader push to roll back the safeguards meant to prevent another financial crisis. I thought you might like to check them out: Banking Regulators Are Making it Easier for Big Banks to Hide Risks by AFR’s Oscar Valdés Viera, breaks down how the Federal Reserve weakened the rating system it uses to supervise the country’s largest banks. Oscar explains that the new rule could allow big banks to keep a “well managed” label even when regulators have identified serious deficiencies in management and financial resilience. Trump Administration’s Banking Deregulation Puts Entire Economy at Risk by AFR’s Maya Jenkins, shows how this fits into a much broader deregulatory assault. Maya walks through the Trump administration’s efforts to slash bank oversight, weaken capital safeguards, make stress tests easier to game, ignore risks in nonbank finance, and open the door to more crypto risk in the banking system. Wall Street does not need more secrecy, weaker oversight, or another chance to gamble with the economy while the public is left to absorb the damage. But that is exactly where federal banking policy is heading. The next financial crisis won’t start being labeled as a crisis. It starts with quiet rule changes, lowered standards, weakened supervision, and industry talking points designed to make deregulation sound harmless. Wall Street wants more room to take dangerous risks (and reap enormous profits), and the people in charge of protecting the financial system are lowering the guardrails instead of strengthening them. That is how small warning signs become systemwide threats. We have seen this before. The 2008 crash followed years of deregulation, weak enforcement, and policymakers ignoring warnings until millions of families lost homes, workers lost jobs, and Wall Street got bailed out. The 2023 bank failures showed again how quickly bad risk management can spill into the broader economy when oversight comes too late. AFR’s research and public education work helps make these issues understandable, urgent, and impossible to ignore. We translate complex regulatory changes into clear warnings about who benefits, who pays, and what policymakers must do before Wall Street’s private risk becomes a public disaster. Check out Maya’s piece here. Check out Oscar’s piece here. After you’ve read them, please share them with your networks, and help us make sure the public understands what is at stake before big banks and their allies rewrite the rules in their favor again. Thank you for helping us expose Wall Street’s risks before they become everyone else’s crisis. -Patrick. Patrick Woodall (he/him) Managing Director Americans for Financial Reform Support this Campaign

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