On Our Radar

The COVID-19 pandemic presented a wide range of sudden financial challenges, from lost jobs and store closures to price gouging and new expenses. Many people lacked sufficient emergency savings to deal with these kinds of challenges. Some even relied on credit cards for basic expenses—in some cases, even for their rent payments.

The basic American contract is that if you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to purchase a home and provide a comfortable living for your family. But this contract has long been broken for far too many people.

Worse, a rule issued last December by a national banking regulator, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), protects predatory small business lenders that exploit financial victims with outrageous loans that greatly exceed state interest rate laws like Florida’s. But the U.S. Senate, including Sen. Marco Rubio, two other Republicans and all Senate Democrats, recently voted to overturn the rule. Our congressional delegation should follow the Senate’s lead in order to stop evasions of our laws and protect small businesses.

When Americans started facing the threat of foreclosure at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, Barack Obama campaigned on a promise of a simple, straightforward, and elegant solution: Force big banks to accept some losses and write down the amounts homeowners owed on their mortgages, thereby avoiding mass foreclosures. Soon after winning office, Obama abandoned the pledge, to the delight of his Wall Street donors.

Real estate prices around the world are flashing the kind of bubble warnings that haven’t been seen since the run up to the 2008 financial crisis, according to Bloomberg Economics.

Ms. Scott made a new round of grants, to 286 organizations. Her net worth, which Forbes estimates at $60 billion, keeps rising, thanks to Amazon stock.

In our new paper, “Long Shadows: The Black-White Gap in Multigenerational Poverty,” we take a multigenerational perspective on economic inequality by race, showing the persistence of unequal economic opportunity for Black Americans across time.

Under the Trump administration, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency at times butted heads with other regulators over issues like reforming the Community Reinvestment Act and offering bank charter access to fintech firms. But new leadership could strengthen the OCC’s focus on coordinating with other agencies, observers say.

America’s municipalities have always been test labs for innovation. As the pandemic begins to ebb in the U.S., we look at a handful of programs that proponents hope will spread across the country.

There is no way to be a billionaire in America without taking advantage of a system predicated on cruelty.

Why do we leave millions of people in poverty? The answer should make us uncomfortable.

Fewer people are riding metro than before the pandemic, even as many restrictions are being lifted, but Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) wants to change that.

On Wednesday morning, the Senate Banking Committee Economic Policy Subcommittee under Senators Warren and Kennedy will hold a hearing on the challenges and opportunities of a Digital Dollar.

New York City transplants are bringing a housing boom — and growing inequality — deep into the Hudson Valley.

Biden’s housing department is restoring the requirement that communities take steps to reduce racial segregation or risk losing federal funds. But missing from the requirement is the 2015 mandate that communities undergo an extensive analysis of local barriers to integration and submit plans to dismantle them to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.