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Aug 1, 2024 | 
rooseveltinstitute.org | Graham Steele |Emily DiVito
Executive SummaryWhen the Biden administration took office, the United States government had a long to-do list for financial regulation. Part of it entailed reversing the Wall Street–friendly policies instituted by the previous administration (Steele 2019a). Another part consisted of unfinished business from the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007–09.
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Jun 27, 2024 | 
rooseveltinstitute.org | Ketan Ahuja |Niko Lusiani |Emily DiVito
IntroductionInnovation is key to improving economic growth and people’s standard of living. Approaches to antitrust should therefore focus on mitigating harms to innovation, in addition to “static” welfare measures like prices. Yet while antitrust cases often mention innovation, litigators rarely center cases around it, and courts almost never intervene in the name of harms to innovation.
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Jun 13, 2024 | 
rooseveltinstitute.org | Lev Menand |Emily DiVito |Morgan Ricks |John Crawford
IntroductionIn March and April 2023, the American system of money and banking teetered on the brink of collapse. Several large banks failed—including Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), Signature Bank, and First Republic Bank—but the real story was the extent of the ad hoc government interventions required to prevent a wider unraveling.
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Jun 5, 2024 | 
rooseveltinstitute.org | Emily DiVito |Todd Phillips |Morgan Ricks |John Crawford
IntroductionThe financial costs of banking lock out millions of Americans from full economic participation. Nearly 5 percent of households in the United States—disproportionately Black, brown, and/or low-income—have no bank account at all, and another 14 percent must still rely on costly, nonbank alternatives at least some of the time.
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Mar 13, 2024 | 
rooseveltinstitute.org | Todd Phillips |Emily DiVito |Joseph Miller
IntroductionThe nature of most crypto assets is contested. The industry asserts that the vast majority are commodities because of their issuers’ decentralized nature, whereas critics argue that most are securities. The former are subject to limited oversight by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), whereas the latter are heavily regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
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Mar 11, 2024 | 
rooseveltinstitute.org | Emily DiVito
March 10, 2024, marked the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), which set off a period of prolonged disquiet in the US financial system—one that, before it was over, saw the collapses of two more large financial institutions, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank (FRB). These three bank failures became the second, third, and fourth largest by assets in US history.
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Mar 11, 2024 | 
rooseveltinstitute.org | Niko Lusiani |Emily DiVito
Introduction: Taxing Monopoly and Taxing WealthToday, large incumbent firms dominate industries across the United States economy—from meat to medicines, finance to tech, and retail to telecoms. This pivot away from a more dynamic, multiplayer, participatory business sector to a stagnant one stunted under the shadow of a few mega-oligopolies has real consequences for people.
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Feb 28, 2024 | 
rooseveltinstitute.org | Emily DiVito
Full, free, and fair access to the money you own, and the financial systems in which it can be safely stored, is necessary to achieve economic security. But America’s current banking and payments system is fee-based, creating a tiered economy where millions of individuals and families are pushed out of the formal banking sector and toward predatory nonbank alternatives—like check cashers, payday lenders, and nonbank financial technology companies.
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Feb 12, 2024 | 
thehill.com | Niko Lusiani |Emily DiVito |Reuven Avi-Yonah
Bipartisan tax policy breakthroughs are rare in Washington these days. So as the Senate considers the bipartisan tax bill to invest in 16 million children from low-income families eligible for the child tax credit (CTC), many hesitate to question what is being offered in exchange: a series of tax breaks for the country’s largest corporations. However, history shows that there are real costs to cutting taxes for the country’s most powerful corporations in exchange for child investments.
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Feb 5, 2024 | 
rooseveltinstitute.org | Emily DiVito
With tax season upon us, a bevy of taxpayers have taken to social media to decry their unexpectedly paltry returns. While this data is anecdotal (indeed, tax season only just started, and most people’s returns could actually be larger this year), the mechanics of why taxpayers might be surprised at their tax bills for 2023—when no major tax law has been passed in years—illuminate a foundational problem: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 made our tax system harder to navigate.
