Congress Passes “Stimulus 3,” AFSA Updating State Resources
Late last night, the Senate agreed to the third coronavirus stimulus package. Media coverage on the bill is comprehensive, but here’s what we think you need to know:
- There is no rate cap included;
- The bill does not deal with any non-mortgage debt collection or repossession issues;
- The credit reporting provisions appear to be codifying what many lenders are already doing;
- Funding to support the Federal Reserve’s lending programs is included; and,
- Lending to small business is also included.
The House plans to vote on the legislation on Friday and we do not expect it to change. The President will sign it as soon as possible after that. Then, Congress will be out of session until April 20.
We are pleased with most of those items, and the federal government’s continued emphasis that financial-service companies are essential businesses. We continue to work on others items that did not make it into Stimulus 3. Mainly, at the federal level, we are asking for: a delay in compliance with the Current Expected Credit Loss (CECL) accounting standard for nonbanks and an expansion of the Federal Reserve’s TALF 2020 program.
At the state level we continue to update our resource page with many updated state coronavirus resources on state employment policy changes, state credit policy changes (proposed and in effect), states of emergency, state DMVs, etc. We are advocating for any state or municipal closures to clearly exclude financial services, and for state regulators to give us time to address coronavirus challenges for our companies and customers before they seek extensive company information. We encourage you to proactively share with your state regulators a general sense of what you are doing in order to help prevent more individual state inquiries. If you have proactively shared information with your state regulators, please let us know, as well, so that we can help advocate with CSBS to encourage their member regulators to give our industry a bit of time and breathing room.
March 26th, 2020
