Loan market shrugs off prison financing protests
Advocacy groups in New York gathered Wednesday near JP Morgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon’s apartment, calling...
Advocacy groups in New York gathered Wednesday near JP Morgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon’s apartment, calling on the bank to stop lending to private prison and immigration detention companies, according to the Center for Popular Democracy, one of the protest organizers.
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Mpls. Fed chief, activists talk about economic gap
The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis met with activists and northside residents Wednesday over...
The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis met with activists and northside residents Wednesday over racial and economic disparities.
Neel Kashkari talked with leaders from Neighborhoods Organizing for Change for an hour — an unusual meeting of a banking insider and a group known for street demonstrations and putting political pressure on the powers that be.
"A big part of my job is to get out and understand first hand what is happening, what are the challenges," said Kashkari who has served on the central bank system since January.
In that time, the former head of the federal government's bank bailout program in 2008 has drawn attention for his warning that failure of some big banks could lead to another financial crisis.
Kashkari said that the Fed's monetary policy can have an effect on unemployment, interest rates and inflation, but he said Congress' fiscal policy will also be key in addressing racial disparities.
Anthony Newby, executive director of Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, said they talked about the high unemployment rate among African-Americans.
"Now we can spend more time collaborating, doing a deeper dive and figure out what are the structural barriers and then what can the Fed do to bridge that gap," Newby said. "That's a big deal and big starting point."
Newby added he was pleased to have someone in Kashkari's position listening to real people struggling to make ends meet.
Kashkari agreed to meet with them again.
By PETER COX
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Denver's rapid charter expansion yields underwhelming results
Denver's rapid charter expansion yields underwhelming results
Dive Brief: Twenty-seven new charter schools have opened in Denver in the last five years with six more set to open...
Dive Brief:
Twenty-seven new charter schools have opened in Denver in the last five years with six more set to open this summer, but critics point to data about underwhelming performance and examples of forced choice that parents don’t want.
An Alternet article reposted by Salon reports some of the charters that have replaced traditional school options practice harsh discipline disproportionately levied against students of color, and opponents argue a small, powerful circle of local leaders have pushed a charter agenda with the support of big money from outside of the city that has bought electoral support.
A report from the Center for Popular Democracy identified 38% of Denver’s charters as performing “significantly below expectations,” and some parents say they’d prefer more funding and support for neighborhood schools over new expenditures on charters.
Dive Insight:
Charter school performance across the country is mixed. There are high-performing charter schools that have impressive student outcomes that proponents can point to as evidence the charter sector should be expanded. At the same time, there are mediocre or low-performing charter schools that critics can point to as saying the sector does nothing more than siphon funding from traditional schools.
While the CPD study found 38% of Denver’s charters to be significantly underperforming, another found six out of eight of the city’s top schools to be charters. A report to the Colorado General Assembly based on data from the 2011-12 school year found similarly mixed results, where charters perform better on some metrics but not on others. Denver is not the only city engaging in this debate, which has become familiar in virtually every major urban area in the country.
By Tara García Mathewson
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CPD's Josie Duffy on Why NY Needs the Scaffold Law
NY1 - August 28, 2014 - CPD's Josie Duffy joins Liz Benjamin on NY1 to discuss why workers need the Scaffold Law.
NY1 - August 28, 2014 - CPD's Josie Duffy joins Liz Benjamin on NY1 to discuss why workers need the Scaffold Law.
When It Comes to Jobs, Fed Up With the Fed
The News & Observer - March 5, 2015, by Kevin Rogers - When the monthly jobs numbers come out Friday, many...
The News & Observer - March 5, 2015, by Kevin Rogers - When the monthly jobs numbers come out Friday, many economists will say that the economy is healthy. Some will even say that wages are rising too fast and that steps need to be taken to slow economic growth. But out in the real world, working families and particularly communities of color are being left drastically behind in the recovery.
The disconnect between the rich and the rest of us is only widening, and that is a real problem when the rich are making the decisions for everyone. For higher wages and more robust employment growth, we don’t need to limit ourselves to the usual discussions and the typical solutions. Rather, we should look in a new direction, to the Federal Reserve, for the necessary policy changes that will usher in real growth on Main Street, not just on Wall Street.
Most people don’t pay much attention to what the Fed does and how it does it, but the reality is that the decisions the Fed makes affect us all, every day.
There are two important ways the Federal Reserve can help:
▪ Ensure a monetary policy that delivers genuine full employment and rising wages for all working families. Raising interest rates in 2015 would be a catastrophic mistake. The American economy needs to see significantly more wage growth, not less.
▪ Provide a more transparent and inclusive approach to policymaking and governance. The Fed needs to listen to the voices of working families, not just banks and mega corporations.
Rampant and uneven unemployment can be measured in numbers, but it means that real-life opportunities fall further out of reach for working parents and that doors close on our children. It means that families are feeling the strain, and disenfranchisement is getting worse.
Permitting the economy to speed up significantly offers only upsides. A new report by the Center for Popular Democracy and the Economic Policy Institute finds that until nominal wages are rising by 3.5 to 4 percent, there is no threat that price inflation will meaningfully exceed the Fed’s low 2 percent inflation target. And such wage growth is necessary for workers to begin to reap the benefits of economic growth and to achieve a genuine recovery from the Great Recession.
Indeed, during the past three decades, it was only in the late 1990s, when the Federal Reserve permitted economic growth to speed up and the labor market to tighten, that workers across the economic spectrum, and in communities of color, saw genuine wage improvements.
As was true then, the Fed is not an innocent bystander in our economy, but an active participant. And yet, despite the clear economic disparities among our communities, voices inside the Fed are now saying that the economy is healthy and that the Fed should tamp down growth so that wages stop rising so quickly.
Although the board members that govern the regional Federal Reserve banks are legally required to represent the broad interests of the public, they mostly represent the financial sector or large corporations – they live very different lives from us, and they don’t take our experiences to the boardroom.
The Fed’s decisions are distant from communities that struggle the most in this economy and simply do not reflect the full diversity of the public it is supposed to represent. This explains why board members have produced an economy that works for them. Millions of working families are left with little hope of a better life.
It is no wonder that supporters of higher wages and fuller employment from across the country are turning up the heat on out-of-touch policies and practices coming from the Fed. Regular families should not be shut out the Fed policymaking process. Instead, they should be at the very core of it.
Source
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article12716264.html#storylink...The Fed’s Big Mistake: Rate Hikes Hurt US Workers
Protesters rallied in Washington, New York City and Philadelphia yesterday against an imminent government action that...
Protesters rallied in Washington, New York City and Philadelphia yesterday against an imminent government action that would damage the financial prospects of ordinary workers. And no, it had nothing to do with Donald Trump.
The Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign wants the Federal Reserve to break with expectations and hold interest rates steady rather than hiking them this week. They believe minority communities have yet to recover from the ravages of the financial crisis, and are still experiencing high unemployment and stagnant wages.
Read the full article here.
CPD's Josie Duffy Debunks Scaffold Law Myths on Capital Tonight
Capital Tonight's Liz Benjamin interviews Center for Popular Democracy Policy Advocate Josie Duffy on the Scaffold Law...
Capital Tonight's Liz Benjamin interviews Center for Popular Democracy Policy Advocate Josie Duffy on the Scaffold Law. For more information on how the construction industry safety standards elude workers of color, read CPD's report "Fatal Inequality."
Fed Draws on Academia, Goldman for Recent Appointees
Fed Draws on Academia, Goldman for Recent Appointees
When the Federal Reserve was established, Congress called for its policy makers to have “fair representation of the...
When the Federal Reserve was established, Congress called for its policy makers to have “fair representation of the financial, agricultural, industrial, and commercial interests, and geographical divisions of the country.”
But Fed officials have recently been drawn from just two backgrounds—academics, either at universities or Fed research departments, and alumni of the financial services firmGoldman Sachs & Co.
The announcement Tuesday that Neel Kashkari would become president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis marked the third Goldman Sachs alumnus in a row to be picked to become a Fed bank president. The other two—Dallas’s Robert Steven Kaplan andPhiladelphia’s Patrick Harker —took office earlier this year.
Mr. Kashkari is a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs and a former Treasury official who ran the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) during the financial crisis. He takes the helm of the Minneapolis Fed Jan. 1, 2016.
Of the 17 Fed officials in office next year—five members of the Board of Governors and 12 regional bank presidents—all but three will have professional backgrounds as academics or with Goldman Sachs. The exceptions will be Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhartand Fed governor Jerome Powell, who worked at other banking institutions, and Kansas City Fed President Esther George, who was primarily a bank supervisor.
“The obvious downside of this is there’s more of a groupthink within the Fed,” said George Selgin, the director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank, referring to the shift toward a narrow range of backgrounds at the central bank. “That can be very dangerous if the groupthink is based on ways of thinking about the economy that are not necessarily sound.”
Mr. Kaplan, a former Harvard Business School professor, had worked as a vice chairman of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., leading investment banking activities. Mr. Harker, the former president of the University of Delaware, served as a trustee of Goldman Sachs Trust and its Variable Insurance Trust.
New York Fed President William Dudley also spent most of his career at Goldman, ultimately serving as its chief economist.
Since the central bank’s founding a century ago, the background of Fed officials has undergone a dramatic shift.
In the early days after the Fed began in 1913, the people selected to run the nation’s central bank were primarily small bankers, reflecting that in the early days, the Fed’s key function was providing banking services to a highly fragmented banking industry. The notion of using Fed policies to steer the broader economy had not yet taken hold.
Through the Fed’s first 40 years, the backgrounds of officials grew increasingly diverse. In the late 1940s, for example, Fed officials included Chester Davis, a former agriculture commissioner and grain marketer; Laurence Whittemore, of the Boston and Maine Railroad and H. Gavin Leedy, a private practice attorney.
The central bank’s leadership also contained many functionaries who rose through the ranks as Fed administrators, such as Robert Gilbert, who in his 20s become one of the first 14 employees of the Dallas Fed. He worked as a loan and discount clerk and in the war loan department, before becoming manger of the Dallas Fed’s El Paso branch and eventually the Dallas Fed President.
Such quaint backgrounds were common among officials in the central bank’s early days but were beginning to dwindle by the 1960s. Today Fed officials who rose through the ranks are almost entirely Ph.D. economists who headed the regional banks’ research departments; the lone exception is Ms. George, who worked as a bank supervisor and Kansas City Fed administrator. Ms. George holds an M.B.A.
Gradually backgrounds in industry, law, and other aspects of government or administration fell out of favor.
“Keep in mind, for much of the Fed’s first half, the focus was really on financial stability,” said Sarah Binder, a George Washington University professor who is also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “There wasn’t a well-worked out body of knowledge about monetary policy.”
As it became apparent that Fed policy held vast sway over the economic fortunes of the country, presidents and regional Fed boards increasingly turned to Ph.D. economists to guide the central bank and to be effective participants during the debates of the policy-making Federal Open Market Committee.
Ms. Binder thinks the narrow range of backgrounds among Fed officials may lead to a central bank that is thin on expertise when it comes to “the responsibilities that are laid on top of the board, in particular, that extend beyond monetary policy.”
The central bank is tasked, for example, with regulating much of the financial system, not only the giant Wall Street banks, but also community banks, insurers and other financial institutions. The Fed retains some responsibilities for consumer protection and community development, is responsible for the nation’s payment systems and continues to operate the discount window and other low-profile back-office banking functions.
Liberal activist groups, led by the Center for Popular Democracy, have pushed for diversity in the appointment of new Fed officials, pressing for representatives of workers and consumers or labor and community leaders. They have had no luck, and with the filling of the Minneapolis Fed presidency and inaction in Congress over two current nominees to the Fed board, there are no looming vacancies for the central bank’s composition to begin a shift.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Fed Up With the Senate
Right now, there are key vacancies at a vital government institution. President Barack Obama has fulfilled his duty and...
Right now, there are key vacancies at a vital government institution. President Barack Obama has fulfilled his duty and put forward eminently qualified nominees to fill the vacancies. Yet despite the nominees' strong credentials, Republicans in the Senate have dragged their feet, and the chair of the committee whose job it is to consider the nominees has refused to even schedule hearings.
No, this isn't the high-profile battle to fill the seat of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. While the fight over Scalia's replacement may be stealing headlines, Republican obstructionism is actually preventing another important government body from functioning as it should: the Federal Reserve. Two vacant spots on the seven-person Federal Reserve Board of Governors have sat unfilled since 2014.
Obama nominated former community banking CEO Allan Landon to be a Federal Reserve governor in January 2015, yet Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby has let Landon's appointment languish for over a year. Last summer, Obama nominated Kathryn Dominguez, an economist at the University of Michigan, to fill the second open spot. But Shelby has reiterated that he will not schedule hearings for Landon or Dominguez.
Shelby's inaction has real consequences for working people. The Fed, like the Supreme Court, functions best when there are no vacancies. Fed governors hold permanent voting positions on the Federal Open Market Committee, the body that sets interest rates and makes crucial decisions that affect unemployment and wages for millions of Americans. When Fed governorships are allowed to sit vacant, some of the most important decisions about our economy are left to a smaller group of people, usually individuals who are more concerned with banking interests than with the interests of workers.
Five seats on the committee are held by regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents. Unlike Fed Chair Janet Yellen and the Board of Governors, regional bank presidents are not accountable to the public. Instead, they are chosen by the boards of directors at each regional bank, which are dominated by representatives from banks and major corporations.
Regional banks' boards tend to fill their presidencies with people who look and think like them; in fact, one-third of the current regional bank presidents have strong ties to a single firm, Goldman Sachs. Research shows that Federal Reserve Banks have historically held more conservative views about the economy. And when the Federal Open Market Committee voted to intentionally slow down the economy in December, it was mostly due to pressure from regional bank presidents who (mistakenly) believed the economy was close to full employment. At the last committee meeting, regional bank presidents, led by Kansas City Fed President Esther George, continued to advocate an aggressive path of rate hikes.
The Senate's failure to act on Obama's appointees means that the committee is dominated by more conservative, bank-friendly voices. And congressional intransigence has meant that this has been true for most of Obama's presidency. As Stanford scholar Peter Conti-Brown wrote last year, "private bankers effectively held a majority on the [Federal Open Market Committee] 58% of the time [during the Obama administration]."
Shelby says he will not consider the nominees because Obama has not appointed a vice chair for supervision at the Federal Reserve, a new Fed position that was created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Though the Obama administration has not appointed anybody to this position, the Federal Reserve says Fed Governor Daniel Tarullo is currently filling that role.
At a post-Federal Open Market Committee press conference last month, Yellen was asked about the Senate's inaction. "Congress intended for the Federal Reserve Board to have seven members," Yellen said, "and that tends to bring on board people with a wide spectrum of views and experience and perspectives. I think that’s valuable, and I would like to see the Senate move forward and consider these nominees so we could operate with a full complement.”
Yellen's point about a wider spectrum of views is a salient one. If confirmed, Dominguez would join Yellen as only the fifth woman serving on the Federal Open Market Committee, an historically male-dominated institution. And as the former leader of a community bank, Landon comes from the very sector that Republicans are constantly complaining lacks representation at the Fed.
Over 5,000 members of Fed Up, a coalition of community and labor-based organizations that works to bring the voices of low-income communities of color into decisions on monetary policy, agree with Yellen that Shelby must act, and have joined the 10 Democratic members of the Senate Banking Committee in urging him to schedule hearings for Dominguez and Landon.
Yellen's call for the Senate to do its job echoes the sentiments of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who, it was reported last month, presciently warned against a dysfunctional confirmation process in a speech given just days before Scalia's death.
To ensure that some of the most important institutions in the country function for the people precisely as Congress intended, the heads of those institutions are imploring the Senate to do its job. For the sake of millions of working Americans, it is time for the Senate to listen.
By Djuan Wash
Source
Jeff Flake lies to a dying man about the impact of his tax bill vote
Jeff Flake lies to a dying man about the impact of his tax bill vote
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) doesn't have the monopoly in telling happy lies about the Republican tax bill in hoping...
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) doesn't have the monopoly in telling happy lies about the Republican tax bill in hoping constituents will let her off the hook. On a flight back to Arizona Thursday evening, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) was politely confronted by fellow Arizonan Ady Barkan, who is also founder of Center for Popular Democracy's Fed Up campaign and was returning home after being arrested protesting the tax vote.
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5 days ago
5 days ago