WASHINGTON – Yesterday, U.S. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) raised the issue of lease-back deals between banks and transit agencies with respect to the recent crash on Washington’s Metrorail system in a letter to House of Representatives Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD). Today, U.S. Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) wrote Rep. Hoyer to offer to suggest that the passage of Menendez’s Close the SILO/LILO Loophole Act (S.1341) would remove the ability of banks to seek windfalls off of these deals and increase the incentive for transit agencies and banks to unwind the deals.

TRENTON – A bill sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester, Cumberland and Salem) to spur small business lending by New Jersey’s community banks by allowing the state to invest a portion of its cash management funds in certificates of deposit, fixed income securities and other investments was approved today by a Senate committee.

The bill (S-2552) is intended to increase the liquidity of New Jersey community banks so they can make more and cheaper capital available to small businesses, local governments and individual borrowers.

In Case You Missed It:
Rob Andrews Backed Bill Allowing Riskier Banks,
Received More Than $1.3 Million in Return

Andrews in top 12% of House members
in campaign dollars received from financial institutions

BARRINGTON – U.S. Rep. Rob Andrews supported the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, “legislation that allowed the nation's largest banks to get even larger and take risks that had been prohibited since the Great Depression,” according to Massie Ritsch of OpenSecrets.org.

Ritsch also discovered that “those members of Congress who supported lifting Depression-era restrictions on commercial banks, investment banks and insurance companies received more than twice as much money from those interests than did those lawmakers who opposed the measure.”

Rob Andrews, who supported the bill, subsequently received more than $1.3 million in campaign contributions from financial institutions.

Read the full article here: http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2008/09/money-and-votes-aligned-in-con.html