The Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and St. Louis are hosting a seminar that focuses on supporting low-income communities and communities of color as they recover financially from the pandemic. Bill Rogers, vice president and director of the Institute for Economic Equities at the St. Louis Fed explained why the effort is important on Wednesday’s Total Information AM.
“It’s really important because wealth does two things,” he said. “One, it helps you to be resilient in times of struggle, but also wealth allows you to plan for the future and grow into the future.”
He said understanding the differences in people’s social and economic situations explains why some people are able to grow wealth and resilience and others aren’t. He said this effort hopes to close the gap.
“Everybody wants to compete, it's just that some folks have these structural barriers that can come from historical approaches to public policies, such as redlining, that still has its effect today, even though it started in the 1930s and 40s,” he said. “But then you also have these contemporary challenging battles that folks face.”
He said now is an especially important time to talk about wealth recovery because the pandemic's economic effects were much broader.
"The pandemic exposed a lot of the fragilities and lack of resiliency that many families faced," he said. "And what was also important about it is this fragility and the lack of resiliency moved up the income scale and moved out from central city areas to the suburbs and to rural areas. The the the impacts were much, much more broad based."
Listen to the full conversation here: