Group Blasts Fed for Lack of Diversity in Leadership
Source: Wall Street Journal
Federal Reserve leadership is overly...
Source: Wall Street Journal
Federal Reserve leadership is overly male, almost entirely white and drawn too frequently from the banking community, according to a group critical of the central bank.
A new report from the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign analyzes the types of people populating the Fed’s Washington-based board of governors, the regional bank presidencies and the regional bank boards of directors.
The report notes that all voting members of the central bank’s rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee and nearly all the regional bank presidents are white. Just two of the 12 presidents and two of the five governors are women.
“These key decision-making bodies remain dramatically unbalanced and unrepresentative of the vast majority of people who participate in the economy,” said the group, which has called for more public input into the selection of regional bank presidents and their performance evaluations.
The center said the composition of the Fed’s leadership bodies violates the spirit of the law that created the central bank, which calls for membership drawn from many different industries and interests.
A Fed spokesman responded to the criticism about the regional bank boards by saying the central bank has “focused considerable attention” to finding directors “with diverse backgrounds and experiences” that represent agriculture, commerce, industry, services, labor and consumers, as the law requires.
“We also are striving to increase ethnic and gender diversity,” the spokesman said, noting a rise in minority representation on the boards from 16% in 2010 to 24% today. Female representation has risen from 23% to 30% over the same period, and all told, 46% of regional directors now are either a woman or a member of a racial minority, the spokesman added.
Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen is the central bank’s first female leader.
The Fed Up group, with a membership drawing heavily from labor unions and community organizations, is a regular critic of the central bank. It has argued in recent months that the Fed shouldn’t raise short-term interest rates and has pressed its case in private meetings with Fed officials. Several of its members appeared outside the central bank’s research conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., last year to call attention to their views.
The group’s concern about a dearth of diversity at the Fed has been echoed by former Minneapolis Fed chief Narayana Kocherlakota. He argued in a blog post last month the central bank has appeared to give short shrift to racial concerns in part because there have been almost no African-Americans in its policy-making ranks. He wrote that the concerns of racial minorities have been “underemphasized” at the Fed.
The last African-American to serve on the Fed board was Roger W. Ferguson Jr., who served as a governor between 1997 and 2006 and as vice chairman from 1999 to 2006. The first African-American to serve as a Fed governor was Andrew Brimmer, from 1966 to 1974.
The report showed particular concern about the directors on the regional Fed bank boards, which are drawn from the private sector. It said 83% are white, compared with around two-thirds of the total U.S. population.
“The diversity of regional board members is meant to inform the bank presidents, who in turn, participate in discussions and vote at the FOMC,” the report said. “However, the boards, the presidents, and the FOMC fail to represent their region’s racial diversity.”
The report also said its analysis found that representatives of banking and what it calls commercial interests have increased their share of regional Fed board seats in recent years. Representatives of community groups and labor unions account for fewer than 5% of the available board seats, according to the center.
Among the regional Fed bank boards’ most high-profile roles is selecting their bank presidents. Recent regulatory changes now bar directors from participating in that process if their firms are regulated by the bank.
The directors also provide information to bank officials about local economic conditions and give advice on running the banks.
Two Federal Reserve Openings Provide One Chance to Counter Trump
The Federal Reserve is facing a significant change in leadership that goes beyond the installation of a new chairman. It is also awaiting the appointment of two other top officials who will play a...
The Federal Reserve is facing a significant change in leadership that goes beyond the installation of a new chairman. It is also awaiting the appointment of two other top officials who will play a crucial role in shaping Fed policy.
President Trump, who has already nominated Jerome H. Powell as the Fed’s next chairman, also gets to pick a new vice chairman. But the other open position, the presidency of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is not Mr. Trump’s choice to make.
Read the full article here.
CPD Condemns Trump Administration Transferring Money from FEMA to ICE
09.13.2018
New York, NY – In response to breaking news that the Trump administration transferred nearly $10 million away from FEMA to ICE at the height of the family...
09.13.2018
New York, NY – In response to breaking news that the Trump administration transferred nearly $10 million away from FEMA to ICE at the height of the family separation crisis, The Center for Popular Democracy released the following statement:
Julio López Varona, Director of Community Dignity Campaigns at the Center for Popular Democracy said:
“The Trump administration would rather lock up children in cages than assist its Puerto Rican citizens to recover from Hurricane Maria. People in Puerto Rico and displaced throughout the United States still urgently need recovery money. Over 97 percent of those seeking funeral assistance were denied. Meanwhile, Trump is beefed up ICE’s budget to lock up primarily black and brown children in cages on the United States/Mexico border. The transfer of money continues the administrations’ relentless attack on black and brown communities. It nothing less than an insult to the people of Puerto Rico.”
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After Volkswagen scandal, can consumers trust anything companies say? (+video)
After Volkswagen scandal, can consumers trust anything companies say? (+video)
Adam Galatioto’s loyalty to diesel Volkswagens predates his ability to drive.
The 29-year-old’s parents first bought a Jetta TDI in 1998, and he drove the little...
Adam Galatioto’s loyalty to diesel Volkswagens predates his ability to drive.
The 29-year-old’s parents first bought a Jetta TDI in 1998, and he drove the little sedan through high school, college, and a master’s program before selling it in 2013. Mr. Galatioto and his girlfriend now share a 2011 Jetta TDI SportWagen, which he helped encourage her to buy.
“They get really good mileage,” he says. “Mine got 50 m.p.g. on the highway. By proxy that means you are being environmentally friendly.”
He’s not alone. Volkswagen has long enjoyed a reputation for reliable engineering, cheerful affordability, and, largely thanks to its efforts in clean diesel, sustainability. In Consumer Reports’ 2014 survey on how people perceive leading car brands, the German automaker was singled out (alongside Tesla) for its fuel efficiency.
That made recent revelations that VW had duped environmental regulators for years, installing software on 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide allowing them to run cleaner during emissions tests than they did on the road, all the more unnerving.
“I don’t generally trust corporations on what they say, and this was so intentionally devious it just lumps them in with any other car company for me,” Galatioto says.
This is a worst-nightmare scenario for companies trying to attract customers that increasingly want to make not just quality or affordable purchases, but ethical ones. It’s an impulse nearly every consumer industry is racing to capitalize on, from restaurant chains shifting to cage-free eggs and fair-trade coffee to retailers pledging to raise wages and give workers more predictable scheduling.
But with such promises being made left and right, and especially in the wake of Volkswagen’s fall, conscientious consumers may be wondering: Can any of them really be trusted?
Not always, clearly, but there is some comfort to be had on that front. Brands that fail to deliver risk even greater financial and reputational fallout than ever before (Volkswagen lost a third of its stock value when the scandal broke, and it faces billions in future losses from EPA fines, repairs, and lost sales). Combined with effective third-party oversight, it’s a powerful motivator for companies on the whole to behave better, experts say.
Consumers, particularly younger ones, are armed with easier access to information about what they buy than previous generations, and it’s affecting their choices. Millennials (adults ages 21 to 34) are more than twice as likely as their Gen-X and baby boomer counterparts to be willing to pay extra for products and services billed as environmentally and socially sustainable, according to a 2014 Nielsen survey. They are equally more prone to check product labels for signs of sustainable and ethical production.
“There’s an increased attention to more intangible characteristics of a product,” says Dutch Leonard, a professor who teaches corporate responsibility and risk management at Harvard Business School. “When I buy a shirt, it has a particular color, it’s soft, or wrinkle-free. But now people are also paying attention to where it was made, if the workers are being exploited, and if the company is environmentally conscious or not.”
This makes responsible changes effective marketing tools, which can create domino effects as companies try to keep up with and outdo standards in their particular industries. When Wal-Mart, the biggest retailer in the world, raised its minimum pay rate at the beginning of this year, competitors such as Target and Kohl’s quickly followed suit. The success of Chipotle, which has a carefully detailed food-sourcing policy, has been followed by major supply chain overhauls for McDonald’s, General Mills, and other giants of the corporate food world.
“Customers want 'food with integrity,' ” Warren Solochek, a restaurant-industry analyst with NPD Group, a market-research firm, told the Monitor in May. “[Companies] that choose locally sourced, fresh ingredients can put that on their website and know that people are looking at it.”
But especially for major corporations, “when you say you are doing things, you will attract attention from outside business groups," Professor Leonard says. "You can bet some NGO [nongovernmental organization] is going to try and figure out if that’s true or not.”
Indeed, Volkswagen isn’t the first brand to have its positive positioning face pushback, especially as global companies work to strike an operational balance between ethics and profitability. Wal-Mart’s wage hikes were followed by cutbacks in worker hours when the retailer’s earnings suffered, a move that led labor advocacy groups to call the earlier wage hikes “a publicity stunt.” Earlier this week, the Center for Popular Democracyreleased a report showing that Starbucks has so far failed to live up to a much-publicized vow from a year ago to give workers more consistent schedules.
While Volkswagen eluded the Environmental Protection Agency, it was eventually found out by the International Council on Clean Transportation, an independent nonprofit aided by researchers at West Virginia University.
In addition to catching such discrepancies, watchdog groups can be helpful in weeding out credible claims of positive change from the less so. In the mid-2000s, the Unions of Concerned Scientists’ annual environmental consumer guide largely dispelled the idea that washable cloth diapers are significantly better for the environment than disposable ones.
Furthermore, some major corporations and industry groups have partnerships with independent, NGO-like organizations to set ethical industry standards and submit to outside monitoring. Unilever, for example, teamed up with the the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in the 1990s to create the Marine Stewardship Council, a certification program for sustainable fisheries. In 2008, Starbucks embarked on a decade-long project with Conservation International to improve the sustainability of its coffee supply around the world. Home Depot sells lumber certified by an outside organization.
Such collaborations may not catch everything, Leonard says, but they are effective because they are “constructed in such a way that the [certification groups] are not beholden to an industry. We may not be able to get full agreement on the standards, but we might make real progress by creating safe harbors through development of standards that are negotiated in advance.”
Source: The Christian Science Monitor
Arpaio Meets Virtually No DOJ Criteria for a Pardon
Arpaio Meets Virtually No DOJ Criteria for a Pardon
President Donald Trump’s unorthodox, dysfunctional behavior and decision-making may lead him to violate a whole slew of new norms if he announces a pardon Tuesday night, as he has said he might,...
President Donald Trump’s unorthodox, dysfunctional behavior and decision-making may lead him to violate a whole slew of new norms if he announces a pardon Tuesday night, as he has said he might, for former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Legal analysts and Dept. of Justice guidelines reviewed by TYT suggest that granting a presidential pardon to the controversial former sheriff would go against virtually every recommended criteria the DOJ has for appropriate pardon candidates.
Read the full article here.
The Fed has a rare chance to prove it's not Wall Street's bank
The Fed has a rare chance to prove it's not Wall Street's bank
William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is retiring early, creating another vacancy at a central bank already in a flux of personnel changes. Here’s a suggestion to the...
William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is retiring early, creating another vacancy at a central bank already in a flux of personnel changes. Here’s a suggestion to the the New York Fed’s board of directors, which will select Dudley’s successor: Try to avoid picking another banker.
Read the full article here.
Sewer Socialism and Rebel Cities, part 3: Immigration Sanctuary
Sewer Socialism and Rebel Cities, part 3: Immigration Sanctuary
Several organization have put together resources for municipalities wanting to enact sanctuary policies: Local Progress is aggregating sanctuary city resources from multiple organizations.
...Several organization have put together resources for municipalities wanting to enact sanctuary policies: Local Progress is aggregating sanctuary city resources from multiple organizations.
Read the full article here.
No, 2016 Won't Be the Year of the $20 Minimum Wage
Bloomberg Businessweek - November 13, 2014, by Josh Eidelson - In the midterm elections, four red states—Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota—passed minimum wage increases. Those votes...
Bloomberg Businessweek - November 13, 2014, by Josh Eidelson - In the midterm elections, four red states—Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota—passed minimum wage increases. Those votes mean that, starting next year, a majority of states will have minimum wages higher than the federal rate. The last time that happened, in 2007, Democrats newly in control of Congress used their power to pass the first national increase in a decade, from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour. It’s extremely unlikely the Republicans who took back the Senate in the midterm elections will do the same. “Waiting for Congress to act is frustrating and, at this point, pointless,” says Ed Flanagan, a former Alaska labor commissioner who spent a year campaigning for his state’s new increase, from $7.75 to $9.75.
Already, labor organizers in Oregon are considering a ballot initiative for 2016 that would raise the state minimum to $15 an hour, matching the leap taken this year by Seattle and San Francisco. In Los Angeles, where Mayor Eric Garcetti signed an ordinance mandating a $15.37 wage floor for some hotel workers in October, 6 of the 15 members of the city council have asked for a vote in early 2015 on a proposal to increase the city’s rate to $15.25 across the board by 2019.
Voters in most states shouldn’t expect to see pushes for higher rates than that anytime soon. Labor activists say they want to end the exclusion of tipped workers such as restaurant wait staff from minimum wage laws and add worker protections, like requiring employers to give workers advance notice of schedule changes or offer paid sick days. That approach worked this year in Oakland, where voters approved a referendum on Nov. 4 that lifts wages only to $12.25 but requires employers to offer paid leave above what the state requires. “When you combine them together, it’s actually more popular,” says Brian Kettenring, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, a union-backed community organizing group. “People appreciate that you are trying to actually solve the problem.”
Not all the coming fights will be put directly to voters. In California, Democratic Governor Jerry Brown signed a compromise bill last year increasing the statewide minimum from $8 to $10 by 2016. Some Democratic state lawmakers say that’s not enough to help workers make ends meet. “It will still allow the legal payment of a poverty wage,” says Mark Leno, the state senator who sponsored a bill that would have increased minimum pay to $13 by 2017 and then indexed future wage levels to inflation. That passed the state senate in May but failed by a single vote in an assembly committee. Leno plans to revive the issue in the next legislative session.
In some cities, Democrats are pitting themselves against the Republicans who control their state governments. Louisville has held hearings about raising wages to $10.10 after a statewide increase died in the Republican-controlled state senate. City officials in other states are hamstrung by laws prohibiting municipal governments from raising minimum wages above state levels. In June, business-friendly Democrats in Rhode Island’s statehouse killed efforts by the Providence city council to raise hotel pay to $15 an hour with a budget rider barring cities from setting their own minimum wages. In New York, where state law denies cities authority over pay rates, Governor Andrew Cuomo agreed to support changing that statute, along with a statewide increase to $10.10, to win the endorsement of the progressive Working Families Party in the November gubernatorial election. “He made a promise on this,” says Bill Lipton, the party’s New York director. “We expect him to fulfill it.”
Source
The Housing Recovery Has Skipped Poor and Minority Neighborhoods
On October 11, 2009, when Isaac Dieudonne was two years old, his family moved into a new home in Miramar, Florida. As they began to unpack, young Isaac bounded out the...
On October 11, 2009, when Isaac Dieudonne was two years old, his family moved into a new home in Miramar, Florida. As they began to unpack, young Isaac bounded out the front door in search of fun. The parents found him several minutes later, floating dead in the fetid pool of a foreclosed house.
Since the financial crisis began in 2008, approximately 5.7 million properties have completed the foreclosure process, and stories like this begin to answer the critical question of what happens to all those homes. While many are resold, too often they fall into disrepair, creating blight that drags down property values and turns communities into potential deathtraps, attracting not just mosquitoes and mold, but crime and tragedy.
According to expert reports, this neglect occurs disproportionately in communities of color, part of a disturbing pattern. While the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the ability to use the Fair Housing Act to challenge discriminatory effects in neighborhoods, the nation’s neighborhood layout looks more segregated than ever, exacerbating the racial wealth gap. There’s no point in having an anti-housing discrimination law if it isn't vigorously employed to prevent a real societal division that drags down minority families. The Justice Department, free of uncertainty about the Fair Housing Act’s future, needs to work to realize the law's intended purpose.
The housing recovery has skipped more low-income neighborhoods.Fifteen percent of homes worth less than $200,000 are still underwater, where the borrower owes more on the house than it’s worth. This is compared to only six percent of homes over $200,000. Property values in low-income neighborhoods have not bounced back to the degree of their wealthier counterparts.
An important study from Stanford University shows how this housing divide doesn’t align with socioeconomic status, but with race. Middle-class black households are more likely to live in neighborhoods with lower incomes than the average low-income white household. This creates fewer opportunities for minorities, as neighborhood poverty can predict the quality of schooling and the availability of jobs for the next generation. Areport from the American Civil Liberties Union shows that median household wealth for African-Americans continued to drop after the housing collapse, long after median wealth for whites stabilized. They project this to continue well into the next generation, with a drop in the average black family’s wealth by $98,000 more than it would have been without the Great Recession.
Foreclosures are largely responsible for this widening disparity. Predatory lending was directed at minority homeowners. Subprime mortgages weregiven disproportionately to minority borrowers, and after the housing bubble collapsed, these loans failed at higher rates. Racial segregation prior to the crisis turned these neighborhoods into targets, with subprime lending specialists going door-to-door and luring even those who owned their homes outright into refinances with dodgy terms. Banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America paid fines for pushing minority borrowers into subprime loans, even when they qualified for better interest rates. But these fines—$175 million and $335 million, respectively—were substantially lower than they paid for other bubble-era abuses.
More black and Latino borrowers had their wealth exclusively tied up in their homes, and when they lost them, more of their wealth dissipated. Even after the collapse, the Federal Reserve found that from 2010-2013, net worth of nonwhite or Hispanic families fell 17 percent, compared to an increase of 2 percent for white families.
This wealth transferred in part to Wall Street. Private equity and hedge funds scooped up hundreds of thousands foreclosed properties in low-income communities, and converted them into rentals. This prevented minority homeowners from benefiting from any return in property values, and displaced many from their neighborhoods. And a recent survey of community organizations finds that this has created higher rents and more transient neighborhoods.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development, along with quasi-public mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, auction off these homes to investors at a discount, according to a study from the Center for Popular Democracy. The U.S. Conference of Mayors recently passed a resolution urging these government lenders to sell instead to non-profits that would work to protect homes from foreclosure.
And then there is the disparate treatment of foreclosed properties repossessed by banks, known as real estate owned (REO). The National Fair Housing Alliance’s findings in 29 metropolitan areas indicate that REO in communities of color are twice more likely to have damaged doors and windows, overgrown weeds and trash on the premises and holes in the roof or structure. This violates the Fair Housing Act: Banks are responsible for maintenance and upkeep on all properties, and if they neglect that in black and Latino neighborhoods, the Justice Department can sanction them.
The failure to maintain foreclosed properties has multiple negative effects for communities. Blight creates health and safety concerns, acts asmagnets for crime, and lowers property values for neighboring homes. It also reduces the tax base for municipalities, as nobody pays property taxes on an empty house. The city of Detroit has already lost $500 million from foreclosures in the past few years; 78 percent of homes with subprime loans are know foreclosed or abandoned.
Last week, fifteen Senate Democrats, including leaders Chuck Schumerand Dick Durbin and ranking member of the Banking Committee Sherrod Brown, asked regulators to open an investigation into the treatment of foreclosed properties. “The same communities of color that were victimized by predatory lending may now be facing the double whammy of racial bias when it comes to the upkeep of foreclosed homes,” said Brown. But policing foreclosed properties would only begin to close the gap between white and non-white neighborhoods.
The entire point of the Fair Housing Act, passed shortly after Martin Luther King’s death in 1968, was to reverse the findings of the Kerner Commission, that the country “is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” But reading through these statistics, you wouldn’t know the Fair Housing Act existed. We are further than ever from what Justice Anthony Kennedy described as the act’s “role in moving the Nation toward a more integrated society.” It has been impotent in the face of multiple discriminatory shots at people of color, which has opened up a historically large wealth gap and crippled their opportunity.
Until we figure out another way for the middle class to build wealth other than purchasing a mortgage, the discriminatory effects of our housing system will further a permanent underclass among people of color in America. The Justice Department has an enormous amount of work to do.
Source: The New Republic
THE BUZZ 4: Federal Face Time
THE BUZZ 4: Federal Face Time
JACKSON HOLE, WY – Last Thursday was the first time the most powerful financial players in the U.S. formally met with the people their policies affect. During the Federal Reserve Economic Policy...
JACKSON HOLE, WY – Last Thursday was the first time the most powerful financial players in the U.S. formally met with the people their policies affect. During the Federal Reserve Economic Policy Symposium at Jackson Lake Lodge, a meeting between the Fed and Fed Up sparked impassioned speeches that burned through barriers of language, culture, race, and socio-economic status. But the fervency expressed by Fed Up members seemingly had little influence on the Fed’s impending decision to raise interest rates, something Federal Reserve board chair Janet Yellen announced in her annual address the following day.
Still, members of Fed Up—a syndicate of the Center for Popular Democracy built around the ideology that the Fed’s policies affect people of every skin color and income bracket—were encouraged by the meeting.
Shawn Sebastian is the field director of the Fed Up campaign. “I think the meeting with the Fed was historic and unprecedented,” he said. “There are never that many Fed officials in the same room at the same time talking about monetary policy, and they’re certainly not doing that with low income people of color.”
Federal Reserve board leaders like Neel Kashkari, Lael Brainard, Esther George and board vice president Stanley Fischer all participated in the Fed Up roundtable.
The landmark meeting was the result of Jackson Lake Lodge overselling hotel rooms that Fed Up members had reserved. After the group filed several federal complaints, the Fed agreed to the sit down.
‘Don’t slow down the economy’
Echoes of agreement among Fed Up’s constituency rippled through the crowded room at Jackson Lake Lodge Thursday as the roundtable began. Members of Fed Up elucidated ideas of stagnant wages, unemployment, and underemployment that disproportionately plague people of color in the United States. Fed Up members explained how the Federal Reserve’s pending decision to slow down the economy by raising interest rates could damage already neglected communities. Nearly every speaker from Fed Up concluded with one central idea: Don’t slow down the economy. Not yet. Don’t hike interest rates. Not yet. Our communities are still underserved. Our people are still underpaid. Our unemployment rates are still nearly double the national average.
Esther George, chair of the KC Federal Reserve, responded to protestors with deference to Congress. “Our objective is to follow mandates of what Congress has made out,” she told the crowd. “The objective is not to slow down the economy; that would be irresponsible.” George continued by explaining that the objective of the Fed was to walk the balance beam between the ideal of full employment and the consequence of potential inflation due to an oversaturation in the job market.
Fed Up’s expert on economic forces, Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, said the Fed’s concerns about inflation should be adjusted in light of the impacts of the Great Recession. Bivens claimed a period of “overshooting” employment targets are necessary to heal the effects of that economic disaster, and that this period of overshooting is especially important to people of color, because it takes longer for their unemployment rates to catch up to national averages.
“[If] The Federal Reserve starts slowing the economy, it starts halting progress in reducing unemployment before the benefits of that reach the last people to be hired,” Bivens said.
Promising diversity
Fed Up seemed to impact members of the Federal Reserve Board on a few fronts. Several ambitious promises were made by members of the Fed, catalyzed by discussions held during the roundtable. Sebastian believes the most concrete impacts Fed Up had on the Federal Reserve were when Lael Brainard of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors committed to seriously considering a slate of candidates for board positions that more closely reflect America’s diversity. The board’s lack of diversity is a source of contention among Fed Up members, as the board is comprised of 16 white, predominantly male members. The only exception is Neel Kashkari of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, who is of Indian descent. Fed Up members are not the first to point this out, however. This summer a formal letter of complaint, signed by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and some 127 other lawmakers, demanded the Federal Reserve open up to more diversity.
Another victory for the Fed Up campaign happened when Kashkari recommitted to an impressive research project studying racial disparities. Minnesota and Wisconsin, both states within Kashkari’s district, are rated the worst states in the country for black people to live based on a report by 24/7 Wall Street. Kashkari’s goal is to find the source of the disparities that propagate those statistics.
Blacks in Wisconsin face an unemployment rate of 21 percent which is more than quadruple the national average. Their incarceration rate is the third highest in the country, and their rate of home ownership is the tenth lowest. At a meeting earlier this month in Minneapolis, Kashkari sat down with Neighborhoods Organizing for Change to discuss the problem.
“Some of the racial disparities are a crisis, and we need to treat them like a crisis,” Kashkari said. “There’s something structural in the U.S. economy, in good times and bad, that black unemployment is almost always twice as high as white unemployment.”
However, in spite of all protestor efforts, in what is considered to be one of Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen’s most important speeches of the year, she explicitly stated that interest rate hikes were on the horizon. Yellen told the audience at Jackson Lake Lodge, “Indeed, in light of the continued solid performance of the labor market and our outlook for economic activity and inflation, I believe the case for an increase in the federal funds rate has strengthened in recent months.” PJH
By Natosha Hoduski
Source
3 days ago
3 days ago