Tag: Disability

Equality Banking: A Roadmap

~ Karen Petrou ~ Leave a comment

By Karen Petrou

  • Economic inequality and ultra-low interest rates create a vicious cycle in which rates drive down savings, financial intermediation becomes less profitable, unequal households have still more difficulty preserving income and accumulating wealth, banks drop equality-essential services, consumers are made still more unequal, and it all starts all over again.
  • Breaking this cycle requires hard decisions about which retail-banking services genuinely enhance economic equality and quickly developing effective, measurable delivery channels to promote widespread adoption.
  • There is no shortage of commitments from high-level federal officials supporting equitable finance; what’s missing are specific, near-term action steps.
  • This post thus provides a step-by-step roadmap for quick public- and private-sector innovation, regulation, and inclusion. 

Almost a decade to the day after the “Occupy Wall Street” movement crystalized the populist politics that now characterizes U.S. debate, the Acting Comptroller of the Currency announced that his agency’s top priority is reducing inequality.  This echoes the Biden Administration’s emphasis on equality and racial equity, but all of these high-minded goals are more hortatory than clear directives.  They are thus unlikely to advance equitable banking, exacerbating not just economic inequality, but also America’s discontent and resulting disfunction. Reducing economic inequality is clearly essential, with banks and other financial companies sure to face mandates or even public-finance competitors if vital needs are not quickly and equitably met. 

Continue reading “Equality Banking: A Roadmap” →

Why a Racial-Equity Mandate Isn’t Enough: Action for Inclusive Financial Policy

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By Karen Petrou

  • The lack of racial equity in U.S. monetary and regulatory policy is only part of the problem.  Inclusive policy must reach all groups – including persons with disabilities – now overlooked by the Fed and thus left behind by the U.S. economy.
  • The Fed’s monetary policy mandate in current law is already inclusive, but unmet and unenforced.  Fixing that by legislation may focus the Fed’s attention with better data, but data aren’t enough.
  • Inclusive financial policy effectively reaches all under-served groups via equality-focused financial regulation and ground-up – not trickle-down monetary policy.  The Fed is already a fiscal agent via its huge asset purchases, but this is the opposite of inclusive policy due to its direct and unequal wealth impact.  Inclusive policy realigns monetary and regulatory accountability, but does not replace it with a still greater fiscal presence.
Continue reading “Why a Racial-Equity Mandate Isn’t Enough: Action for Inclusive Financial Policy” →

Dialing for Dollars: Solving CBDC’s Equality Conundrum

~ Karen Petrou ~ 1 Comment

By Karen Petrou

  • CBDC advocates tout its inclusiveness, but the digital divide is a profoundly exclusionary impediment to CBDC access for LMI, disabled, older, and rural households. 
  • Centralized deposit-taking and payments via the Post Office and/or Fed pose challenges to personal privacy and even freedom of expression that, if not averted in initial design, could come to pose significant political and governance risk.  Lack of private competition also presents discrimination risk based on pricing or other terms not subject to outside scrutiny.
  • If CBDC succeeds as some envision it, then lending will come either from the federal government – Big Brother problems of still more concern – or capital-markets sources outside the perimeter of safety-and-soundness and often also consumer-protection regulation and enforcement.
  • A CBDC in which the Fed acts as an open-source utility corrects for many current inclusion, governance, and intermediation obstacles to payment-system speed and efficiency. 
Continue reading “Dialing for Dollars: Solving CBDC’s Equality Conundrum” →

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in American Well-Being

~ Karen Petrou ~ 4 Comments

By Karen Petrou and Matthew Shaw

Yesterday, FRB Vice Chairman Clarida said that the U.S. economy is in “in a good place.”  However, The Fed’s new study of American economic “well-being” shows that huge swaths of the United States are struggling harder than ever before to make ends meet.  All but the most affluent Americans asked about how well they’re doing don’t feel anywhere near that good about it.  Combine this with new data on the evaporating American middle class and an ugly picture quickly merges.  In it, the prosperity in which the Fed takes such comfort rests thinly atop millions – indeed a hundred plus million – of Americans who are barely getting by at the height of the business cycle following a record-breaking “recovery.”  No wonder that so many Americans remain so angry about their economic prospects and why political polarization is sure to define the 2020 election at least as much as it determined 2016’s outcome.

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If You Really Want to Be Unequal, Be Disabled

~ Karen Petrou ~ 1 Comment

By Karen Petrou and Matthew Shaw*

Like most who assess U.S. economic inequality, we’ve focused in this blog on the way income and wealth divide across Americans in general, by race, by age, by gender, by ethnicity, and even by nothing more than where one lives.  However, working on another pro bono initiative – this time to speed biomedical research – it’s dawned on us that there’s another major factor that divides the haves from the have-nots that’s even less the result of individual action than all these well-studied demographic criteria:  disability. Continue reading “If You Really Want to Be Unequal, Be Disabled” →