Downtown Protest Held Over Racial Disparity in Employment
KMOV St. Louis - March 5, 2015, by Steve Savard - About 12 people rallied outside the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis...
KMOV St. Louis - March 5, 2015, by Steve Savard - About 12 people rallied outside the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Thursday to protest the racial disparity in employment in the St. Louis region.
White unemployment in the St. Louis area is 5.7 percent, African American unemployment is 14.1 percent. Organizers said they want the Fed to adopt policies focused on getting more people get back to work.
“It’s not easy getting a job, when you are qualified even when you look the part,” one demonstrator said.
Organizers said the story of one attendee demonstrates the problem.
“When you do get the job, it’s something to get you buy, but it’s not a livable wage,” Ray Rounds said.
Rounds said he left a low paying job to go back to school at the Green Technology Training Program at St. Louis University.
“I’m certified in lead remediation, mold, asbestos, permit required confined spaces, hazardous material. I’ve got 17 of those certificates I was really proud of and I was ready to go to work,” Rounds said.
Rounds said he has not been able to land a job in the two years since he finished school.
“It’s pretty frustrating because with all I thought that I had accomplished. It’s meaningless because there are no jobs,” Rounds said.
Rounds has been attending rallies, working with churches and other organizations to try and make a difference. He hopes the contacts he has made will help him land a job.
Demonstrators also said they want to see more diversity on the Federal Reserve Board.
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Women Have a Voice: Watch 2 Protestors Confront Senator Jeff Flake to Call for an FBI Investigation
Women Have a Voice: Watch 2 Protestors Confront Senator Jeff Flake to Call for an FBI Investigation
Before Senator Jeff Flake shocked the world by requesting an FBI investigation into sexual assault claims made by Dr....
Before Senator Jeff Flake shocked the world by requesting an FBI investigation into sexual assault claims made by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Friday, the Arizona Republican was confronted in an elevator by two protestors who attempted to convince him to call for the probe. The scene was caught on video by people in the hallway, and may have ultimately tipped the scales in Flake’s determining whether to make his pitch to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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Why Recent Stock Volatility Shouldn’t Factor Into Interest-Rate Hikes
As a general principle, the Fed should not react to short-term movements in the financial markets. For one thing, the...
As a general principle, the Fed should not react to short-term movements in the financial markets. For one thing, the labor market is much more important to the lives of most Americans, and it is more relevant to the Fed’s mandate of securing maximum employment with inflation stability.
Then consider this: More than 80% of stock wealth in the U.S. is owned by the wealthiest 10% of Americans, and more than half of Americans own no stocks at all (either directly or through retirement or other accounts). In short, movements in the stock markets do not have much effect on the spending power of most U.S. households. That means that movements in the stock markets–especially short-term volatility that is likely to largely dissipate–provides little information about the overall state of economic health.
On the other hand, the labor market provides the vast majority of income to the vast majority of Americans. The middle fifth of households, for example, gets more than 80% of household income directly from the labor market (either cash wages or employer-provided benefits). Further, many additional sources of income such as pensions, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, or the Earned Income Tax Credit hinge on participation in the labor market. That’s why trends in the labor market are crucial to assessing the overall state of the economy–which is far from fully recovered from the Great Recession.
The clearest remaining weakness is wages. The current pace of hourly wage growth is roughly 2% to 2.5%. A healthy labor market that met the Fed’s overall price inflation target should be churning out wage increases of at least 3.5%. Further, a period of wage growth well above this is necessary for workers’ pay to reclaim some of the ground lost to corporate profits earlier in this recovery. Until wage growth starts moving durably toward the healthy 3.5% target, it’s too early for the Fed to begin raising rates.
This labor-market-based reasoning for keeping rates low should weigh much more heavily on Fed calculations about interest rates than recent stock activity. The only caveat: if one of the root causes of recent stock market declines–the slowdown in the Chinese economy–provides a new potential headwind to U.S. growth going forward.
But the case for keeping rates unchanged in September was dispositive last week, even before large declines in the stock markets. And any strong stock rally in the coming month shouldn’t make Fed officials feel fine about raising rates.
Source: Wall Street Journal
CFPB: Financial firms can no longer force consumers to use arbitration in group disputes
CFPB: Financial firms can no longer force consumers to use arbitration in group disputes
Consumers can now sue banks in class-action lawsuits. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Monday financial...
Consumers can now sue banks in class-action lawsuits.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Monday financial companies will no longer be allowed to force customers to use arbitration to settle group disputes, restricting the industry's favored legal tool after years of review.
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Activists invite St. Louis Fed president on north St. Louis bus tour
Activists invite St. Louis Fed president on north St. Louis bus tour
Activists with a group pushing for changes at the Federal Reserve asked St. Louis Fed President James Bullard to...
Activists with a group pushing for changes at the Federal Reserve asked St. Louis Fed President James Bullard to accompany them on a bus tour of some of the poorest communities in St. Louis.
About a dozen activists delivered an invitation for the tour to a St. Louis Fed official at the regional Fed headquarters downtown. An equivalent number of police watched.
“You’re very removed when you’re in that rarified air of the Federal Reserve,” said organizer Derek Laney.
The group is affiliated with the national Fed Up campaign, which is pushing for more diversity on regional Fed boards and wants the Fed to put more emphasis on keeping unemployment low rather than controlling inflation. Laney is affiliated with Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, a local activist group that speaks out on issues such as policing and coal companies.
The activists’ demonstration coincided with the Fed’s Open Market Committee meeting Wednesday, where Fed officials decided, as expected, to again hold off raising its benchmark interest rate.
Still, some expect the Fed could signal another small rate hike at the end of the year, similar to a small increase in December 2015 that was the first hike in almost 10 years.
Even discussing an increase will still affect market interest rates and economic growth — an unnecessary move while many people are still trying to benefit from the tepid economic recovery, said Nick Apperson, an executive from downtown tech firm LockerDome who participated in the demonstration.
“While it’s likely they’re not raising interest rates in this meeting, … they’re hinting that they’re going to, which will have a similar effect,” he said.
Laney said the group also wanted to call attention to comments Bullard made last month at the annual conference attended by Fed officials and other top central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyo. Fed Up activists attended the event to speak with officials, and during an interview with CNBC, Bullard said that one of the group’s funders, Facebook co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz, should have come in person rather than sending “all these people.”
“If Bullard wants to walk back those comments he made at Jackson Hole, he needs to walk our streets and talk to our folks,” Laney said.
By Jacob Barker
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The resistance is making one last all-out push to kill the GOP health bill
The resistance is making one last all-out push to kill the GOP health bill
More than 300 health care activists, disability rights advocates, and organizers gathered on second floor of the...
More than 300 health care activists, disability rights advocates, and organizers gathered on second floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Monday morning to oppose Senate Republicans’ Graham-Cassidy health care bill.
The bill would sharply reduce spending for Medicaid by billions of dollars by tying it to medical inflation, blow up Obamacare’s marketplaces, and open the door for states to curtail protections for patients with preexisting conditions.
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Activist Group Presses for Diversity on Fed Boards
Activist Group Presses for Diversity on Fed Boards
An activist group on Monday named a slate of candidates it would like to see placed on the boards overseeing the...
An activist group on Monday named a slate of candidates it would like to see placed on the boards overseeing the regional Federal Reserve banks, saying these people would promote diversity at the central bank and de-emphasize the influence bankers have on policy makers.
The slate of candidates is in large part aimed at addressing what the left-leaning Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign sees as a lack of minority and female representation in the leadership ranks of top central bank officialdom.
“Regional Banks’ boards are disproportionately white, male, and from the corporate and financial sectors,” the group said in a report. “Regional Banks have continually selected bank directors without transparency or public input, and most directors’ backgrounds suggest that they are likelier to be familiar with the interests of the wealthy than with the interests of low-income individuals and communities of color,” the group said.
The Federal Reserve’s Shifting Makeup
The group identified a slate of candidates drawn from academia, think tanks and unions who could serve as directors at the 12 regional bank districts. These prospective candidates are mainly women or people of color. None are bankers or financial market participants.
The group also said the continued role of bankers on boards continues to create conflicts of interest between the Fed and regulated financial institutions. “The potential for conflicts of interest will remain high as long as commercial banks and financial institutions continue to dominate Fed leadership,” Fed Up said in its report.
Fed Up’s Candidates
The boards overseeing the regional Fed banks have long been a flashpoint. While the Washington-based Board of Governors, now led by Chairwoman Janet Yellen, is explicitly part of the government, the 12 regional banks exist as quasi-private institutions overseen by boards composed of a legally mandated mix of bankers, community members and business representatives.
The most public responsibility of these boards is to guide the selection of new regional bank presidents and to reapprove these officials when their terms are up. Directors from institutions regulated by the Fed aren’t involved in this process, but they were until several years ago.
The regional Fed boards also help oversee regional Fed operations and provide intelligence on local economic conditions. Most Fed bank presidents have spoken very favorably of their boards and have pointed out these directors have no influence and have no special access to Fed monetary policy-making.
The Fed Up campaign has been pressing the central bank for some time on diversity issues, to some successes. In May many congressional Democrats signed a letter to Chairwoman Janet Yellen expressing concern about what they saw as a lack of diversity among the Fed’s top officials and boards of directors. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton also expressed support for getting bankers off Fed boards.
The Fed countered then that it is done a lot to improve diversity and that it would work to do even better in the future.
And speaking in early June with reporters, Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan acknowledged the problem, saying “diversity, racial diversity, ethnic diversity of all kinds leads to better decision making and greater performance. That’s something we should be striving for at the Fed.”
Earlier this year, former Minneapolis Fed leader Narayana Kocherlakota indicated in a blog post that a lack of African-American representation in policy-making positions may have caused officials to pay insufficient attention to the needs of this group during the financial crisis.
By MICHAEL S. DERBY
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GOP accuses Dems of stalling Kavanaugh over document requests
GOP accuses Dems of stalling Kavanaugh over document requests
Jennifer Epps-Addison, network president at the grassroots Center for Popular Democracy, stressed that public access to...
Jennifer Epps-Addison, network president at the grassroots Center for Popular Democracy, stressed that public access to Kavanaugh's legal opinions and documents from his time in the Bush administration is "the bare minimum of transparency Americans should expect before confirming a Supreme Court nominee."
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Immigration Advocates on SB 4: We’re Resisting in Texas
Immigration Advocates on SB 4: We’re Resisting in Texas
Grassroots leaders and local officials wasted little time organizing a coordinated campaign to fight SB 4, a new Texas...
Grassroots leaders and local officials wasted little time organizing a coordinated campaign to fight SB 4, a new Texas law that targets cities, towns and sheriffs that don’t cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
Only nine days after Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed the legislation, formally known as Senate Bill 4, into law, grassroots advocates announced a “Summer of Resistance” campaign May 16. The statute allows police officers, sheriff deputies and Texas state troopers to ask about a person’s immigration status – whether they are here legally – during a routine stop.
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Taking Selfies and Talking Inequality, has Janet Yellen Gone Too Far?
PBS - November 21, 2014, by Simone Pathe - One recent brisk morning in the nation’s capital, about 30 community leaders...
PBS - November 21, 2014, by Simone Pathe - One recent brisk morning in the nation’s capital, about 30 community leaders and workers from around the country, all clad in matching green T-shirts, posed for a group photo on Constitution Ave. Ten guards huddled at the top of the walkway separating them from the Federal Reserve.
The workers weren’t protesting. They weren’t sightseeing. They were there to meet Janet Yellen.
“That’s a big deal,” said former Fed vice chair Alan Blinder.
Friday marked the third time in the past month that Yellen has been in the public eye for engaging with the public, or at least with economic issues much more on their minds than, say, quantitative easing.
First, it was her speech at a conference on inequality organized by the Boston Federal Reserve. On that same trip, she met with the jobless at a nearby community center. And then, she posed for selfies.
The string of incidents has raised questions about the public face of the Fed, and when it’s appropriate for Yellen, an unelected government official with enormous power, to inject herself into public debates that may have political overtones.
“I see no harm in her talking and listening to people,” said Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “But those situations can magnify and invite off-the-cuff remarks.”
Yellen certainly doesn’t want to be a politician, said Alan Blinder, vice chair of the Fed under Bill Clinton. But making those off-the-cuff remarks is an “occupational hazard” of the position, he added, especially when testifying in front of lawmakers. Some chairs have handled it better than others, and both Blinder and Strain agree that Yellen’s comments about inequality were slight as indiscretions come. Alan Greenspan was famous for weighing into policy debates too freely, as when he endorsed George W. Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security in 2005. That behavior inspired Ben Bernanke to shy away from any incursions into the public dialogue unrelated to monetary policy.
A Rare Meeting
Bridging the gap between the public dialogue and what’s arguably the most powerful economic institution in the world is exactly what Yellen has been doing.
While her remarks about inequality have sparked the most controversy, her invitation to a coalition of community organizers, labor leaders, low-wage workers, faith leaders and liberal economists is the farthest step she’s taken toward involving the public in the Fed and its policies. She didn’t just meet the “Fed Up” campaign, as they call themselves, in a spare conference room. They sat in the inner sanctum of one of the most cloistered agency’s of the U.S. government — the board of governors meeting room, where the Federal Open Market Committee meets in private to decide monetary policy.
Fed Up’s tagline — “What recovery?” — illustrates the disconnect between the two-thirds of voters who told exit pollsters earlier this month that the economy is getting worse and headline economic figures that are growing stronger. Unemployment is now as low as it was before the recession. But wages are barely keeping pace with inflation, while unemployment for some demographics and geographic regions remains much higher than the average. Nationally, African Americans were unemployed at a rate of 10.9 percent in October. In Atlanta, the unemployment rate for blacks is nearly 14 percent, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, one of the parties to the Fed Up campaign.
Workers didn’t travel to Washington to protest Yellen, said Amador Rivas, of Harlem; they just wanted her to hear what’s happening on the ground. Jean Andre echoed those remarks. Andre, a member of New York Communities for Change, used to do locations support in the film industry. “You know, one of those names at the end of the movie that no one reads,” he said. He lived a middle-class lifestyle. But after the financial crash, he lost his home and struggled to find a full-time job to pay for a mortgage modification.
To some on the right, though, Yellen’s meeting looked like it was going beyond a simple meet-and-greet with the public. American Principles in Action blasted her for discussing monetary policy “with representatives of an extreme political view,” and requested a similar meeting for a chance to express their concerns with low interest rates.
Fed Up does have an agenda when it comes to monetary policy: they want the Fed to keep interest rates low to stimulate jobs and, they argue, higher wages. They’d also like the Fed to buy municipal bonds as a form of lending to cities and states.
Their campaign took off earlier this month with a call to democratize the very table at which they met Friday. In early 2015, the presidents of the regional Federal Reserve banks in Philadelphia and Dallas are stepping down, and Fed Up called on the board of governors and regional banks to release the names of possible successors and to give the public input, if not the opportunity to serve on the regional boards. (The Philadelphia Fed on Friday morning released the name of the search firm vetting candidates, which has established an email to receive public inquiries.)
“We had Wall Streeters in the building all the time,” Blinder said, reflecting on his time as vice chair. This “signals the Fed is as interested in these groups as the financial markets.”
“The Fed is too important of an institution to be insulated from the voices and perspectives of working families,” said Ady Barkan, an attorney at the Coalition for Popular Democracy, the group that organized the meeting.
That’s why Friday’s meeting with Yellen was so significant for them. “The people who are the true consumers who finance the economy finally have a chance to have input,” Andre said. The meeting was a significant event for the Fed, too. “We had Wall Streeters in the building all the time,” Blinder said, reflecting on his time as vice chair. This “signals the Fed is as interested in these groups as the financial markets.”
A Central Bank Can Only Do So Much
Even if their message resonates, though, the Fed, and Yellen as its public face, does not necessarily have authority to address every plight of working Americans. Yellen has herself said many times that wages are still too low in this recovery. “If they’re trying to elicit sympathy that wage earners aren’t making enough,” Blinder said about Fed Up, “they’re preaching to the converted.”
The central bank has no control over wages, except in the sense that wages typically rise in a tighter labor market, said Blinder. Holding short-term interest rates low is supposed to boost employment, and it has — unemployment has dropped from above 10 percent to below 6 percent — but so far, that’s done little for wages.
As for buying municipal bonds to lend to cities and states in need, Blinder doesn’t think that’s the Fed’s business, even if it does have the legal authority to do so. Its dual mandate to maintain full employment and stable prices is about national economic policy, he said, and there’s no way it would be able to choose which states’ bonds to buy.
The Fed and Inequality
Likewise, the Fed has no policy tools to directly address economic inequality. That’s why Yellen’s Oct. 17 speech, more than anything else, has left Blinder, a close friend, and Strain, who still thinks she’ll “make a great chair,” feeling uneasy.
Of course, the Fed isn’t totally removed from the debate over inequality. The central bank conducts research on the subject as an economic phenomenon, and the Boston Fed organized the entire October conference at which Yellen spoke around the topic.
In fact, plenty of the Fed’s critics accuse the central bank and its bond buying program of contributing to the divide between Wall Street and Main Street. “The fact that quantitative easing has driven up the stock market to what some would call dizzying heights does in fact exacerbate wealth inequality,” Blinder said. But to him, that’s just collateral damage. “If the instruments you have are limited and work through financial markets,” he added, “that’s going to be a side effect.”
But reduced income inequality can also be a side effect of the Fed fulfilling its mandate. Blinder pointed to the second Clinton Administration as a period when plentiful jobs — “if your breath showed in the mirror you could get a job” — slowed the growth in the gap between top and bottom earners. (Clinton’s economic legacy — including his administration’s impact on inequality — is a subject of continuous debate.)
The “Fed Up” campaign isn’t interested in side effects, though. Their mission statement singles out the Fed for its ability to make a difference in the lives of working Americans: “President Obama, Congress, and most state legislatures have failed to strengthen the economy — and have often made things worse. But the Federal Reserve has tremendous power over the economy.”
That power is precisely why Blinder and Strain agree that the Federal Reserve must be insulated from politics. Talking to labor, community leaders and Wall Street is important, said Blinder, but the transparency for which Bernanke, and now Yellen, has been lauded is about monetary policy, not taxes or inequality.
A Step Too Far?
For many conservatives, Yellen crossed the line with her Boston remarks, especially when she said, “The extent of and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concern me.”
To Strain and others on the right, Yellen sounded far too Democratic in her concerns about inequality, as she did when she alluded to universal pre-k, another policy priority often associated with the Democratic Party.
Did Yellen betray herself as too blue? Richard Reeves, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, doesn’t think so. The substance of Yellen’s speech offered more to conservatives, he wrote, particularly her acknowledgement of business ownership and inherited wealth as “building blocks” of opportunity in the United States.
Republicans in Congress may not see it that way, though, which is another reason Yellen’s remarks worried Strain. He’s afraid they’ll only fuel GOP efforts to rein in the central bank. There’s a reason Congress doesn’t have oversight over monetary policy: it doesn’t mix well with politics, said Blinder. “You’d get too high inflation because there’s the temptation, among all these politicians, to juice up the economy just before elections.”
For Fed Up organizers, though, Yellen’s meeting with them last Friday is not a sign she’s identifying with either party, but that the Fed can be, in the words of the Kansas City Rev. Stanley Runnels, of Communities Creating Opportunity, “an unconventional source of hope” for millions of Americans.
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