Departments

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banking

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    5/31/2023

    Can Activists Use Banking Regulations to Force Decarbonization?

    by Bart Elmore

    After Clinton-era reforms enabled consolidation of the banking industry, environmental groups in the early 2000s began to target the commercial banking sides of the firms that raised capital and provided credit to the fossil fuels industry. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    10/27/2022

    The Freedman's Bank Forum Obscures the Institution's Real History

    by Justene Hill Edwards

    Vice President Kamala Harris's recent remarks at the forum enlisted the Freedman's Bank to celebrate public-private partnerships between banks and minority communities. The real history of the Freedman's Bank shows why public-private partnerships and moral uplift are inadequate to promote financial equity. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    9/13/2022

    The Half-Century Road to the Student Debt Crisis

    by John Thelin

    A fatal mistake made by Congress in 1972 was to expand aid to students, imagined as consumers, through the Guaranteed Student Loan program, instead of subsidizing institutions to control costs. 

  • SOURCE: Public Books
    12/13/2021

    Public Thinker: Destin Jenkins on Breaking Bonds

    by Hannah Appel

    "As your work so powerfully shows, the municipal bond market structures racial privilege, entrenches spatial neglect, and distributes wealth and power. American cities are dependent on financiers, rating agencies, and bond markets for nearly everything."

  • SOURCE: Governing
    9/21/2021

    Redlining Happened, but Not Exactly the Way We've Thought it Did

    New economic research reinforces an argument made by historian Amy Hillier, that federal agencies didn't invent "redlining" but responded to widespread public prejudices that imagined Black residents as threats to neighborhood property value. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    5/1/2021

    What History Can Teach Banks About Making Change

    by Destin Jenkins

    "Celebrating Juneteenth and recruiting more Black bankers is one thing. It is quite another for financial firms to use their unique power to actively undermine the systems that perpetuate racial inequality."

  • SOURCE: Black Perspectives
    3/9/2021

    The Roots of Racial and Spatial Inequality

    by Kimberley S. Johnson

    As part of the AAIHS's roundtable on Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's "Race For Profit," urban studies scholar Kimberley Johnson looks at the ways that generations of housing policy enabled banks to write predatory loans to Black buyers, profiting first by high interest, then by foreclosure, while blaming outcomes on the individual irresponsibility of Black borrowers. 

  • 11-28-14

    Banking on Crime

    by William R. Polk

    Why do so few citizens seem to care that banks are getting away with fraud?

  • SOURCE: Huffington Post
    12-5-13

    NPR's Robert Siegel Needs a Reality Check

    by Peter Dreier

    Most of the workers who occupy Wall Street on a daily basis can't make ends meet. But neither can their $22,000-a-year counterparts in any other part of the country.