Tue 13 August 2019:
Many African Americans have difficulty accumulating savings in part because they lack access to mainstream financial services like banking, a new study on the contributing factors to the U.S. racial wealth gap by McKinsey & Co found on Tuesday.
Many minorities in the United States depend on more expensive financial services like check-cashing counters since there are fewer banks in non-white neighborhoods. Increasing access to basic banking services, like checking and savings accounts, could save individual black Americans up to $40,000 over their lifetime, the report found.
“Black families are being underserved and overcharged by institutions that can provide the best channels for saving,” said the report authored by McKinsey partners Shelley Stewart and Jason Wright.
Further, banks in black neighborhoods typically require higher account balances to avoid service fees. The average minimum balance in white neighborhoods was $626, compared with $871 in black neighborhoods.
The racial wealth gap, or the difference between the average white and black households’ net worth, has expanded over the last two decades, according to federal data. As of 2016, the wealth of the average white family was 10 times higher than the average wealth of a black family. The white household had a net worth of $171,000 while average black and Hispanic households had a median net worth of $17,600 and $20,700 respectively.
The gap became a talking point on the campaign trail after presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren published a plan to close the gap by giving $7 billion to minority entrepreneurs and expanding the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).
Regulators including the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency are considering overhauling the CRA, a law passed as a follow-on to civil rights era laws meant to prevent racial discrimination in lending, and to end practices like “redlining” in which banks effectively refused to lend in certain neighborhoods.
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