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Dear Friend,
With things going so well and the organization on the upswing, now is a perfect time for a leadership change, which is why I announced my intention to retire from Better Markets after 16 years following the appointment of a successor. The Board has created an Executive Search Committee and hired DRiWaterstone to lead the search for a new President and CEO—the position description/criteria are at DRi’s website. After that search and following a transition, I will remain as a resource to the new leadership and to the organization as a member of the Board and a Distinguished Senior Fellow. I look forward to staying in touch, active, vocal, and fighting so that the American Dream is available to all Americans, not just the wealthy, well-connected or those with high priced lobbyists pushing their special interests to the top of Washington’s agenda.
The Deregulatory Onslaught Continues—And So Does Our Fight
At the CFTC, the push to normalize unregulated prediction markets—essentially legalized gambling dressed up in the language of financial innovation—reached a new level of brazenness. When CME CEO Terry Duffy publicly warned of the dangers of these unregulated contracts at a misleadingly named CFTC “Innovation Advisory Committee” meeting, I called on the CFTC Chair to actually listen to him. When one of the financial industry’s senior leaders is sounding the alarm about how unregulated gambling can damage markets vital to all Americans, regulators should listen. Instead, we have watched the CFTC collaborate openly with the very crypto and prediction market companies it is supposed to regulate. This is the worst kind of “regulatory capture,” which Better Markets recently documented with a detailed statement and fact sheet.
At the CFPB—the agency that returned more than $20 billion to almost 200 million ripped off Americans before the Trump administration destroyed it—we watched a different kind of damage. The Bureau made the decision to stop publishing consumer complaint data. Let that sink in: the cop on the beat charged with protecting consumers from financial predators quietly killed the very database that gives the public a window into how those consumers are being harmed. Our Policy Director and COO Amanda Fischer was direct: the CFPB is protecting Wall Street and Big Tech, not the people it exists to serve.
And then there are the banks. Federal regulators proposed revisions to the system used to evaluate the management of the country's banks. Our Director of Banking Policy, Christopher Appel, said it plainly: weakening bank management supervision leaves Main Street exposed. After the bank failures of 2023, and after years of fighting to ensure that lessons were learned and standards enforced, bank regulators recklessly rolling back oversight of how banks are managed endangers depositors, savers, small businesses, community banks, and the entire economy.
Finally, our Director of AI, Innovation, and Economic Opportunity, Evan LeFlore, is the thought leader the country needs now (take a minute to look at his materials here), illustrated by his engagement with the House Financial Services Committee on a question that will define the next generation of financial services: Who does AI in finance actually serve? If artificial intelligence is deployed in ways that entrench existing inequalities, extract wealth from Main Street consumers, and avoid meaningful oversight, AI will define itself as nothing more than a new instrument of exploitation. Policymakers need to ask the right questions now—before the industry’s profit maximizing activities answers the question in their favor.
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