Access to credit and the right zip code are often gateways to success for small businesses.
While banks keep merging, advocates are trying to make sure low income communities won’t have to pay for it.
Housing equity groups, nonprofit lenders and developers argue that financial institutions should play a larger role in addressing affordable housing needs.
On debate stages and in selfie lines, Elizabeth Warren has been offering herself to voters as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ideological heir.
Co-published by Splinter
The Treasury Department not only sided with banking lobbyists’ definition of “financial services,” but its new rule’s fine print echoed their interpretations of the 2017 federal tax law.
A coalition of elected officials, local residents and community leaders are encouraging Los Angeles’ City Council to require that any bank it does business with not engage in the kinds of unethical practices that helped mire the city’s current bank, Wells Fargo, in scandal.
Everyone struggles with what appear to be questionable overdraft fees, along with hidden credit card and cellphone fees. But low-income communities are particularly targeted for predatory practices.
With the failings of large banks in the news, Capital & Main assembled a panel of bankers and advocates last week to discuss an alternative vision for an industry that affects the lives of nearly everyone in the country — at a time when the Republican Congress is stripping away consumer protections at every turn.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, knows something about pay increases. Last year, JPMorgan Chase’s board gave Dimon a 35 percent pay increase, from $20 million to $27 million, even though the bank’s profits fell two percent and it laid off 6,671 employees.
You know the old joke. It gets tailored for whatever the despised group of the moment is:
Q: What do you call 10,000 [lawyers/politicians/whatever] at the bottom of the ocean?
A: A good start.
I was thinking about that recently with regard to Wall Street and bankers. The popular (and populist) rage that has been rising against Wall Street seems to be reaching new levels. According to Gallup, Americans rank the “honesty and ethical standards” of bankers as “low” or “very low” at a rate about three times higher than we did in the mid-1980s. (The vast majority of that increase came after the most recent financial meltdown.) And politicians – even Republicans – now regularly use Wall Street as an easy punching bag for cheap political points.
It’s hard to argue with the sentiment. Those people did ruin a minimally well-functioning economy.
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Today, Mayor Garcetti will deliver his first State of the City address to outline his goals and vision for the coming year. One can expect a focus on his “back to basics” message of creating a stronger economy and more efficient and effective city government. As he delineates those “basics” and how he hopes to achieve them and pay for them, the Mayor needs to make sure he is taking a full accounting of what’s happening in his own City Hall backyard – ensuring that the fulfillment of his vision doesn’t come at the expense of our streets, communities or workers. An item that requires his immediate attention is the draining of hundreds of millions of dollars from city taxpayers each year.
It turns out that the city of Los Angeles spends more than $200 million on annual fees to Wall Street banks and other financial institutions. This eye-popping figure is detailed in a new research report released by Fix LA,