"You are in a Catch-22," said Emmanuel Caicedo, a senior campaign strategist with Demos, one member of a coalition of 79 labor and civil rights organizations that formed the NYC Coalition to Stop Credit Checks in Employment.
"You can't pay your bills and so your credit is bad. And then you can't get a job to pay your bills because of your credit."
Demos and coalition partners have reached an agreement with the City Council and de Blasio administration to send a bill banning the use of employment credit checks to the City Council floor. In response, President Heather McGhee issued the following statement:
“We are pleased to see progress made in the fight for equal opportunity employment in New York City. Employment credit checks are a catch-22, preventing qualified workers from getting a job just when they really need one most. The biggest drivers of credit problems are job loss and medical emergencies.
Middle class income stagnation, and the inequality that it causes, is the principal economic challenge for the nation — and finance is to blame for it.
Late Tuesday, news broke that yet another unarmed American, a black man named Walter Scott, was killed by a white police officer. As with Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and Rodney King nearly 25 years ago, the brutality was captured on video for the world to see. The New York Times put the damning evidence at the very top of its homepage and it quickly spread throughout social media networks provoking outrage, disgust, horror, grief. These reactions have come most vocally from black Americans.
Warren Buffett warned investors that bankers were still up to their old tricks in his recent investor letter. Vanguard founder Jack Bogle is writing about how high fee mutual funds are ripping off investors and endangering retirement security. And Fed Chair Janet Yellen is touting new, tougher capital rules for “Too Big to Fail” banks.
After years of hardship, America’s middle class has gotten some positive news in the last few months. The country’s economic recovery is gaining steam, consumer spending is starting to tick up (it grew at more than 4 % last quarter), and even wages have started to improve slightly. This has understandably led some economists and analysts to conclude that the shrinking middle phenomenon is over. [...]
The last two years of Obama’s presidency will largely be defined by his defense of key legislation: the Affordable Care Act, caps on carbon emissions and Dodd-Frank. While the broad shape of the first two battles is already known, the war on financial regulation, because of its abstract nature, will often be waged outside of the public eye.
New York, NY — Last night, provisions were added to the House of Representatives' 2015 omnibus spending bill which would repeal crucial features of the Dodd-Frank Act.
In response, Demos Senior Fellow Wallace Turbeville issued the following statement:
On a new survey which finds that hedge funds and traders of stocks and bonds are predicted to see bonuses drop by as much as 10 percent from last year.
The FDIC estimates there are 10 million people living in the U.S. who do not have a bank account — that’s one out of every 13 households. Nearly 33 percent of people living in Starr County, TX can’t write a check. In one census district in Savannah, GA, over 42 percent of residents are unbanked. The unbanked are usually poor, often minorities, and find themselves shunned by banks that can’t make money off them. Typically, they end up turning to predatory check cashers and payday lenders. Many also feel a great sense of social division between themselves and those who have bank accounts.
Los Angeles lawmakers were expected to vote Wednesday on a proposal to renegotiate or terminate an interest rate swap deal from the mid-2000s that critics say now costs the city millions of dollars a year in fees. If successful, the initiative could make the city the nation's largest to challenge ballooning Wall Street levies that accompany similar interest rate swap deals throughout the nation.
Competition and innovation in bank payments risk being undermined if the system’s new regulator is too heavy handed, a report from Demos Finance warns.
The government is setting up a regulator to ensure new and smaller banks get a fair deal when using larger rivals’ systems. But analysts at Demos worry some actions to address this could backfire, prompting banks to withdraw services rather than comply. The think tank also wants the new regulator to consider potential uses for collecting tax data.
When a city is forced to spend more on Wall Street fees than on basic public services, it is the sign of trouble. When that city is one of America's biggest population centers, it is the sign of a burgeoning crisis.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, East Egg represents inherited wealth and privilege, while West Egg represents wealth earned through innovation and hard work, a distinction at the core of the American ideal. We have always embraced a dynamic capitalism, marked not by stasis but rather “creative destruction,” lionizing trust-busters as heroes of competition.
Thomas Piketty’s wildly popular new book, “Capital in the 21st Century,” has been subject to more thinkpieces than the final episode of “Breaking Bad.” Progressives are celebrating the book — a
Here's a quick question about your retirement savings: When was the last time you checked the fees on your 401(k)?
If you're like most Americans, chances are you're not sure what exactly your plan is charging you. Even though employers are now required to disclose more information about 401(k) fees, only about half of workers said they actually noticed the data, while just 14 percent made changes after reviewing the information, according to a 2013 study from the Employee Benefit Research Institute.
For decades, rapid economic growth has been the norm for developed countries. An educated workforce, a large population boom, major technological advances, and abundant fossil fuels were the key components of growth, generating substantial and broadly distributed increases in standards of living in many countries. We have grown so used to such growth that we inevitably view it as a panacea for a host of economic ills, whether it's a deep recession or income inequality.
We now understand, however, that the postwar growth paradigm is not environmentally sustainable.