On Our Radar

For now, the lack of aid for renters has landlords bracing for a wave of missed payments.

“All recessions exacerbate existing inequalities by race and ethnicity — and always hit black and Hispanic workers harder — but this one will be worse,” Heidi Shierholz, policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, told The Washington Post at the time. “It will be an absolute nightmare.”

Homes with a significant number of Black and Latino residents have been twice as likely to be hit by the coronavirus as those where the population is overwhelmingly White.

Some Asian American business owners question how they will survive the crisis.

Democrats and consumer advocates were also fiercely critical of the OCC’s original proposal with the FDIC, which would replace the current, more-subjective CRA framework used to rate banks’ compliance with a single ratio meant to capture the volume and frequency of loans to low-income areas.

“We’re already in crisis and then this came around. And we’re like walking zombies,” Lopez said in an interview with Bloomberg Law. “We don’t know whether to pay rent, to eat or go homeless.”

Black patients were losing limbs at triple the rate of others. The doctor put up billboards in the Mississippi Delta. Amputation Prevention Institute, they read. He could save their limbs, if it wasn’t too late.

KEY POINTS
– Magic Johnson, the CEO of Magic Johnson Enterprises, partnered with MBE Capital Partners to offer $100 million in loans to minority- and women-owned companies.
– The funds will be distributed through the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program.

Each person who has died of COVID-19 was somebody’s everything. Even as we mourn for those we knew, cry for those we loved and consider those who have died uncounted, the full tragedy of the pandemic hinges on one question: How do we stop the next 100,000?

“I do think we need to take a step back and ask, over time, ‘Is it enough?’ And we need to be prepared to act further. And I would say we are if the need is there,” Powell added.

After the rocky rollout of the PPP, BND’s Hardmeyer said, “the federal government figured out what we knew for years: The best way to deliver these disaster programs is through community banks.”

A former economist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau accused Trump appointees of steering the bureau’s reversal on payday lending rules to gut a key provision.

The nonprofit newsroom MLK50, founded by Wendi C. Thomas, aims to carry on the work that Martin Luther King Jr. started.

New research suggests that many small businesses owned by people of color are struggling particularly hard to survive the pandemic-induced financial crisis.

Areas with “widespread economic segregation and heavy concentrations of poverty, people of color, and crowded housing” had higher mortality rates compared with everywhere else from the beginning of the year through April 15, they found.