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In the News
In 16 Years, the Fed Has Approved 4,506 Bank Mergers and Denied One
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens for Wall Street On Parade | January 19, 2023 On Tuesday, Jerome Powell’s Federal Reserve once again thumbed its nose at President Biden’s antitrust directive regarding the creation of more mega banks through merger. This time...
Racial bias in L.A. home loans – City National Bank reaches $31m settlement with DOJ
By Michael Finnegan for Los Angeles Times | January 12, 2023 City National Bank has agreed to pay $31 million to settle a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit alleging racial bias in its home mortgage lending in Los Angeles County. The government’s complaint,...
A Policy Renaissance Is Needed for Rural America to Thrive
By Tony Pipa, senior fellow at the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution. Opinion in New York Times | December 27, 2022 (Emphasis by AFLEP) In what has become a postelection tradition, there has been no shortage of analysis the past several...
Millions of ‘unbanked’ Americans lack adequate access to financial services
By Paul Solman & Diane Lincoln Estes, PBS News Hour | December 26, 2022 It's not well known, but about 4.5% of U.S. households are unbanked, meaning no one in the house has a checking or savings account. The rate declined during the pandemic because people...
Community-Owned Commercial Real Estate Is Having A Moment
By OSCAR PERRY ABELLO at NEXT CITY Earlier this year, Crystal Ortiz started walking up and down Kensington Avenue looking for a proper storefront she could rent out for her growing business. When she found it right down the street, she was delighted that she didn’t...
Daily Yonder Q&A: How Public Banks Can Keep Revenue Local and Support Small Communities
by Claire Carlson, The Daily Yonder September 23, 2022 This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. A public bank is a financial institution that is managed by the government in the public interest, which is...
Big City Mayoral Races Shine A New Light On Public Banking
NEXT CITY, by Oscar Perry Abello September 27, 2022 Public banking is already making headlines in one big city mayoral race slated for next year, and it’s bound to come up in at least one more. (photo: Philadelphia City Hall, by Jose Fontano / Unsplash) New Mexico...
Hear Us: Public Banking for Racial Justice
June 8, 2022 | Next City Op-Ed, by Lebaron Sims – More than a decade after the Great Recession, America is again experiencing a supply-side recovery. Whether via the $700 billion bailout of 2008 or the unchecked exponential growth of 2022, commercial banks and financial corporations eat first – while most Americans, especially the working-class Black and Brown communities most affected by crisis, struggle without support. Then and now, that contrast is particularly sharp in New York City, a global center of finance, the home of countless banks, and an early epicenter of the pandemic. Members of Public Bank NYC (PBNYC), a coalition of organizations and other stakeholders committed to financial justice in New York City, had another vision, rooted in racial equity and environmental justice.
REPORT: Public Banking Key to Building Community Wealth in New York City
May 26, 2022 | DEMOS – Wall Street has a long history of putting profits over people. The big banks perpetuate structural racism in housing, labor, and climate. Instead of serving the public good, they prioritize shareholder returns over the needs of people and communities. A public bank in New York City would help combat the racist and extractive banking system and build community wealth. Each year, the City of New York moves tens of billions of public dollars through Wall Street banks—the same banks that persistently redline NYC’s neighborhoods of color, that finance private prisons, fossil fuel extraction, and other destructive industries.
Wells Fargo Rejected Half Its Black Applicants in Mortgage Refinancing Boom
March 10, 2022 | by Shawn Donnan, Ann Choi, Hannah Levitt and Christopher Cannon
When Mauise Ricard III paid a $560.43 application fee to Wells Fargo & Co. on Valentine’s Day in 2020 to refinance his mortgage on a four-bedroom brick colonial in a leafy suburb of Atlanta, he had every reason to expect an easy ride. The Microsoft Corp. engineer is married to a doctor and has a credit score north of 800, putting him in America’s credit elite. The loan officer at the bank even told him he was probably eligible for a fast-track appraisal.
SEED NM 2022 Symposium: Bob Mang on how business guilds can regenerate communities
SEED NM 2022 Symposium: Bob Mang on how business guilds can regenerate communities
Bob Mang, Re-Genesis Inc, Co-Founder (Retired) and AFLEP Board member, talks about rural economic development and how business guilds can regenerate communities.Jan 14, 2022
VIDEO Challenging Misinformation About a NM State Public Bank
Episode: Everyone deserves a public bank
“I had the good fortune to work on this initiative before Bernie kidnapped all my time. This is one of those no-brainer initiatives that only the 1% could oppose. It has the potential to save the state millions of dollars by vastly reducing the cost of its bonds to improve infrastructure funding. in a public bank, our state funds can be used to build our local economy and our local infrastructure.”
– Paul Gibson
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