 Hello, welcome everybody. My name is Justin Erickson, and I am the program manager for the Detroit Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Project, which is a project of the Center on Finance Law and Policy, which is bringing you this talk today. The Detroit Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Project has the mission to bring together small businesses with University of Michigan students, faculty, and staff to solve business owners' legal, financial, marketing, operational, and design challenges. And we are duly focused on Detroit neighborhoods and student learning. We work across the University of Michigan and across Detroit. This semester, we are working with 47 teams of University of Michigan students who are enrolled in courses across the University working on projects with Detroit business owners. A brief story about me that I think is relevant to this talk today. When I graduated from college, I worked for an institution-based community organizing effort in Central Florida for an organization called Faith and Action. In that role, I worked with others to fight mostly unsuccessfully for a more compassionate and effective foreclosure assistance response from federal government and the Florida State government. And I also worked again unsuccessfully for reform to the payday lending industry. So for those of you who are a little bit familiar with Dr. Freedline's work, you can imagine that I personally am very interested in her talk today. Dr. Terry Freedline is an associate professor at the School of Social Work, faculty director within the Center on Assess Education and Inclusion, and research fellow at New America and Washington DC. She conducts research to envision, redefine, and move financial and economic justice, particularly for and with individuals and groups, traditionally excluded from and marginalized by the financial system. Her research covers areas such as access to the financial system and participation in today's economy and basic financial products like checking and savings accounts and their importance for conducting a wide range of transactions. Dr. Freedline has studied access to the financial system through a basic bank or savings account as a gateway to the economic world, an alternative to debt for achieving economic goals and an opportunity for acquiring and accumulating wealth. Her most recent research, mapping financial opportunity, investigates the financial system from a macro perspective and the racialized ways that banks, credit unions and payday lenders invest in communities. Before entering academia, she worked for several years as a clinical social worker in the juvenile justice system. And her latest book, which is quite good, Banking on a Revolution, Why Financial Technology Won't Save a Broken System, Professor Freedline calls attentions to systemic issues in society and the economy. Rather than separately dissecting issues, Professor Freedline groups systemic issues under the term financialized racial neoliberal capitalism. Institutions and philosophies are not race and genderblind, she argues, and then demonstrates how racism and patriarchy have infected the world in which we live. So with that introduction is my pleasure to introduce our speaker today, Dr. Terry Freedline. If you do have questions, you can message them to me privately. And I hope we have some time at the end for a Q&A session. Dr. Freedline. Well, good afternoon, everyone. It's such a pleasure to be here with you all today and for you to join me on this afternoon. Thank you, Justin, for that kind introduction. And, you know, sometimes we don't get to see the successes that our work realizes. So thanks for sharing about your work. And I'm sure that there are seeds there that will grow in the future. So I have, you know, immense gratitude for the Center on Finance Law and Policy for inviting me to give this talk. Thank you to everyone working behind the scenes to make this possible. And for those who are joining this afternoon, you know, the process of writing a book, you know, often isn't solitary. So I have benefited from a lot of support in thinking through ideas and learning with others, several who are on the call this afternoon. And so I won't give kind of individual thanks, but do appreciate, you know, that that support and that collective thinking. So I'm going to begin the book or begin the talk like I begin the book by situating us in some historical contexts that have contemporary relevance. And let me give a brief agenda of how I'll move forward. So I'm going to talk through the origins of banks or, you know, banks as an origin story. What that means for fintech and the subtitle of the book is, you know, fintech won't save a broken system and, and what that means. I'm going to talk about, you know, really three chapters of the book, one that focuses on student loans, including financialization and the tyranny of bootstraps, corporate landlords and the climate crisis, and then conclude with a conversation about, you know, how people led movements are shifting power and are bringing revolution to the financial system in some pretty important and exciting ways. I also want to make a few notes on accessibility. So this might also be useful if you're joining by phone today. So I'm a white woman with brown hair. I have on a blue shirt. I'm sitting in a room that overall is pretty empty behind me. There are three pictures framed on the walls. There's some books on a mid height bookshelf in the background, including my book. And those things are visible behind me. I'm going to be sharing PowerPoint slides throughout. And there are a number of images on those slides. My remarks are going to talk through the content of these slides. Those are accessibility purposes. I'm happy to make available copies of my slides that include written caption descriptions for the images. All right. So banks as an origin story, our financial system like the United States is rooted in histories of white racial violence. One of the earliest periods of violence includes the genocide of indigenous peoples. And Laili Long Soldier has a poem that's titled 38 that tells the story of 38 Dakota men. I don't write about this in the book, but I want to share as part of context for this conversation today. And I'd like to thank Hillary Watson and who first shared this poem with me. So 38 Dakota men were mass executed by hanging under the orders of President Lincoln in 1862. And this was in retaliation for what's known as the Sue uprising. So we must remind ourselves of and acknowledge this history because it is still living with us, including the acknowledgement of the University of Michigan is located on the ancestral lands of the Nishweshgado and Anishinaabeg, the three fires people who are the Ojibwe, Adawa and Potawatomi, along with their neighbors, the Seneca, Delaware, Shawnee and Wyandot nations. Indigenous peoples experience the ongoing colonization of their ancestral lands. After the Dakota peoples land was stolen, they starved. And there was a white trader named Andrew Merrick who refused to lend to the Dakota and to extend credit for them, you know, to purchase food. So if you were wondering kind of where is the connection to banks and finance, you know, this white trader refused to extend credit in this case. And he's known for this callus saying, if they're hungry, let them eat grass. Since people who are starved cannot live, the Dakota peoples fought back, settlers and traders were killed, including Merrick. And in response to the Sue uprising, Lincoln ordered the mass execution of 38 Dakota men, which happened just after the Christian holiday of Christmas on December 26, 1862. Notably, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation just a few days later declaring that enslaved people should be freed. And so another period of violence was slavery. Banks were established during slavery to finance the economic and racial system, the economic system of racial capitalism. Racial capitalism is our economic system that stratifies or creates difference in economic value based on socially constructed hierarchy. So based on differences around race or gender or economic class, and it's fundamentally an economic system that concentrates power. There's so much more to racial capitalism than what I'm talking about today. And, you know, we can thank Black political thought that really has especially contributed to our understandings on racial capitalism. But this is a backdrop of our conversation. So early white owned banks in teamwork with white slave holders literally collateralized the bodies of Black peoples who were enslaved as credit onto the ledgers of our financial system. White slave holders surveilled the people that they were brutalizing, they kept detailed records, and then they used those bodies as collateral for amassing wealth for themselves through the financial system. So white surveillance of Black bodies and human capital are part of this early financial system. The Bank of North America is one of the United States first chartered banks and it was proposed by a slave trader named Robert Morris and established in 1781. And this happens at the peak of the transatlantic slave trade. Morris wanted the bank to expand the country's military and to repay revolutionary war debts. So early banks underwrote slavery and invested in militarization. There are two quotes that stand out to me and have been illustrating this history. One is from Angela Glover Blackwell and the others from Alexandra Goodwin. Banks are the underwriters of American racism and police are the muscle of capitalism. And so Morris specifically envisioned the Bank of North America to serve these purposes. Today, the Bank of North America is known as Wells Fargo. Many of the banks and the financial institutions, the insurance companies that have familiar names to us begin their origin stories in slavery. I encourage you to read Carolyn Hussein's politicized microfinance or Peter Hudson's bankers and empire, Mercer Broderon's The Color of Money and Shannette Garrett Scott's Banking on Freedom for full more exploration of these histories. So these are histories of white supremacy and racism and specifically anti-black racism. Banks as institutions or the gears that turn our financial system have financed redlining and segregation. They rely on credit scoring, which is an algorithm that assigns people a score for determining who's worthy of responsible banking to score the assigned difference. Black bars are disproportionately assigned the lower scores. And so then banks can target and exploit them for higher interest loans, which pay, you know, which cost more over the term of the loan. Though banks kind of set the term so that they win either way as they still exploit black and brown borrowers even when they qualify for loans with better terms. These are all practices that advantage whites. In the United States, the median household owes about the median white household, owns about 41 times the wealth of the median black household. Racial wealth divides, these are widening and they're growing. Because our financial system and our institutions are designed to prioritize and to monetarily value whiteness. A good example of this is from the CARES Act and the PP loans that were distributed. I mean, banks didn't need to do anything differently when they were, you know, processing applications for their small business loans. They ended up, you know, discriminating against and not lending to black and other minority on businesses. But simply, they did that by exist by prioritizing their existing customers. So those are those are part of the gears that are already in place and that are already turning. So financial technologies or FinTech cannot save this broken system. It is part of what I argue in the book. Financial technologies or FinTech is this broad set of technologies that range from everything to include online and mobile banking to payment systems, crypto currencies and artificial intelligence. One of the things that I'm going to do throughout my talk today is to weave between kind of individual and institutional levels. So in talking about FinTech, so FinTech that is people facing, like online banking, and FinTech that is institution facing, like hedge funds investment algorithms. And I'm going to attempt to kind of blur these lines for us. I'm also going to associate FinTech with some dynamics that we might not think about when it comes to FinTech. So especially when we focus on FinTech that is people facing, we forget that there's this this whole other kind of range of activities happening, that FinTech is helping to enable. So through combining kind of research evidence and storytelling, if I've done my job well toward the end, I will have helped us consider kind of the many ways, especially FinTech for financial inclusion is used kind of as a sleight of hand. So we're offering up FinTech for helping marginalize groups. It is often a guise that enables the financial system to continue predatory practices and to concentrate power. All the while, it's making, you know, many of the practices like more opaque and even harder for us to see than they already are. So from my vantage point, FinTech operates, you know, much more as an abler of the ways that our financial system and banks and our financial services have already have always operated, not necessarily the disruptor in the ways that, you know, we often hear that word being used. So analysis for FinTech that that lacks a critical analysis of how power is concentrated, of historical understanding of how anti blackness is stitched into our financial system is going to like vastly underestimate FinTech's potential harms to racially marginalized groups. And the thing is, this is something that we are all kind of collectively harmed by. The same time, I don't want to like totally discard all of technology. So it's not my intent to like completely throw away everything. I'm really thankful for the technologies that, you know, make it possible for us to talk today and to connect while we're all kind of physically distanced. But I began this book because in so many spaces where I was working, think tank spaces, academic, financial inclusion, conversations, policy conversations, predominantly white and disproportionately wealthy spaces, there was no critical analysis of FinTech. So there was no concern about people who didn't have high speed internet access in their homes, which was believed to be a small and kind of unimportant group, or information and data extraction or the concentration of wealth, corporate power, or the hyper surveillance of or white and racially marginalized groups, you know, these were really kind of absent from the spaces that I was working in. And so my intent was to elevate kind of a critical analysis where they were absent. FinTech is often marketed as a way to promote financial inclusion for marginalized groups. So it's not just marketed, you know, as another way of banking or managing money, it is often specifically advertised, you know, to benefit marginalized groups, those for whom have, you know, those that have been exploited and marginalized by the same by the financial system for decades. Just last week, there was a Senate banking committee hearing and Senator Loomis of Wyoming said, I see Bitcoin as a great leveler for people of color and for women. So this idea is a pretty pervasive idea that FinTech is is going to include those that it has extort historically excluded. And Stuart Levy, the CEO of Facebook, or the CEO of Facebook's DM project, said that the company was developing their currency to promote financial inclusion, expanding access to those who need it most. And of course, Facebook is also the same company that's criticized for being a monopoly that violates anti trust laws, selling users data, being unable to remove hate speech from its platforms and discriminating in their online advertising. Their, their, their payment systems and their, and their DM currency yet is going to be able to promote financial inclusion in some of these really important ways. So I think then that by moving kind of full throttle toward FinTech for financial inclusion, we, you know, abandon responsibility and turn over social problems to these calculated technologies that are mostly being developed in white wealthy spaces by white engineers who do not have racial justice or anti racism in mind. And, and many who, you know, just see a very narrow part of the financial system rather than its connections to the rest of the whole. And these are technologies that have the potential to make it, you know, really even harder to discern, you know, how, how wealth and power are being concentrated, how black and brown communities are being surveilled in multiple contexts, and how data are extracted. So I began my own critical analysis of FinTech, thinking about high speed internet access, which is a really a prerequisite for using any type of FinTech. I mean, even smartphones have to be connected to the internet. Because my experience has told me that not everyone has high speed internet access. And there's no way that FinTech can solve for financial inclusion, when people already exploited and excluded by banks also do not have internet access. These data, a few years ago, there's a map of the United States on the screen with varying deepening colors, demonstrating different levels of high speed internet access. So in 2016, in the average zip code in the United States, about 50 percent of households have high speed internet access in their homes. That's about half. And this varies across the country, but it's probably lower than we had imagined. And, and things likely have changed in a few years since these data were collected. But, but perhaps not by much. I want to zoom into the state of Alabama. And the state of Alabama in particular, you know, has a has a large rural population, about 41 percent of Alabama's population lives in rural areas. Alabama's rural counties have high concentrations of black and brown, the black and brown residents. And the average kind of high speed internet use in counties in Alabama is 29 percent. So this is this is different than whether or not high speed internet is available. There's there's more coverage than 29 percent. But for households that use it, it's less than a third of households have high speed internet in their home. In the southwestern part of the state, less than 20 percent have high speed internet. So it's so it's even a little bit lower. These same counties in the southwestern part, you know, have some counties with populations 35 to 85 percent of black residents. And these are the same counties that have lost, you know, significant numbers of their bank branches over the last decade. And I wanted to zoom into Alabama in particular, because it bears a lot of similarities to the community where my family lives, where I grew up in my where my family still lives. So this is a picture of my hometown in southwestern Pennsylvania. You're seeing a cornfield that's at the end of the growing season. So that's the corn stocks are chopped down. There's a kind of like a gravel parking lot there with the car sitting in it. This is a poor, rural Christian, predominantly white town. The last bank branch that was here closed a few months ago during the pandemic. The nearest branch is, you know, maybe a 20 or 30 minute drive. And the town is situated in a valley. So there isn't satellite service because it's surrounded by mountains. There's no high speed internet. People still use the equivalent of dial up here. But there is a hill on the top of the town where a farmer has cleared a spot in his cornfield so that people can drive up from the valley, park their car and use their cell phone. And so this is what mobile banking looked like in my community in 2008 when I first grabbed this screenshot from Google Maps. And so I saw this real disconnect between folks who were saying, you know, fintech is going to solve everything in the realities of people's lives and people's real material conditions on the ground. This lot has not faded away over time. So even as mobile banking is supposedly, you know, expanding and allowing more people to pay their bills from the comfort of their, you know, kitchen table, this parking lot has become an even more permanent picture in this community. So the only difference now over a decade later is that the lot is paved. So this is a picture of the same field. Different time in the growing cycle. So there are a few young corn stocks, you know, shooting up from the ground in a field. The car is gone, but that, you know, gravel dirt lot is now paved. So while the financial system and technologists have been doubling down on fintech, this community has has doubled down by paving its hilltop parking lot. The pandemic has made disparate access to high speed internet, you know, much more apparent to us. So we've seen students sitting in school parking lots to access Wi-Fi for their virtual school. We know that states are relying on online portals to schedule vaccine appointments, which is, you know, leaving out some of the people who need the vaccine the most. But for me, in trying to understand, you know, the corporate capitalist business practices that create what we have come to term the digital divide, I learned about the works of scholars and organizers who are raising some other critiques. So for example, Ruha Benjamin, Chris Giliard, Twana Petty, Raul Carrillo, Simone Brown, Sophia Noble, Tamara Knopper and many others who were writing about fintech or writing about technology, thinking about data extraction, discriminatory algorithms, hyper surveillance, where there are new or different forms of technologies that surveil racially marginalized groups who are already targets of surveillance in contexts like policing, housing and education. So some of this should ring to similarities to the history of white surveillance and white racial violence. I was especially drawn to Chris Giliard's writings, who has written about digital redlining in the context of education and Tressy McMillan-Cottam's writings on black cyber feminism and platform capitalism, where she writes about black women's kind of sophisticated uses of technology to navigate institutionalized oppressions and discrimination. And so not only are we confronted with disparate internet access, their works are teaching us that we're creating new digital forms of redlining and expanding a surveillance state that will be used in more punishing ways towards racially marginalized groups. So I propose that digital redlining kind of occurs at this nexus of banking and financial technology. It requires people to sacrifice their privacy, creates differential costs, increased costs specifically for black and brown peoples, and manifests from these intentionally, intentionally, mutually reinforcing policies and practices across multiple actors. So when internet service providers decide not to expand into certain communities at the same time that bank branches are closing, these are policies and practices across seemingly separate industries that ultimately raise the costs. Now internet must be a requirement for virtual schooling or now a smartphone with the right level of upgrades and the software to be able to use mobile banking apps, you know, all of that has costs associated with it. The data that you can download in a given month, that these things collectively raise the costs of banking. So I'm going to give two examples that illustrate the limitations of Vintec, which I suggest cannot fundamentally change some of these existing power imbalances or the concentrated wealth that racial capitalism creates. And the first example is with student loan debt, which I write about in chapter two, the tyranny, the financialization and the tyranny of bootstraps. Financialization refers to this kind of growing, growing influence, the rise of finance and kind of its infiltration in all different aspects of our lives. And education is supposed to be the great equalizer, the straps on the backs of our boots that we can pull ourselves up by. The debt collective, thankfully, has been organizing for years around this issue and kind of elevating for us the problems of student loan debt and that the burdensome amount of student loan debt that people borrow, you know, undermines any possibility of bootstrapping with education. The economic definition of debt is, you know, kind of like money that a person owes. So we think about it as a negative. But debt also acts out kind of like the ideology of an individual responsibility in response to collective problems. So now we see people being forced to take out to take out credit card debt, utility debt, medical debt, housing debt and to take the financial burdens, the financial responsibility of a global pandemic in absence of any sort of sustained public, governmental or collective response. People have been increasingly forced to take responsibility as states have divested from institutions of higher education and tuition costs have raised, for example. And so students do this in the form of student loan debt. Current student loan debt collectively is about 1.7 trillion dollars. This is debt that has risen over time, both as, you know, a share of total debt and also increased rapidly in the amount of debt that people borrow for their educations. And student loan debt is racialized. Debt is racialized in a lot of different ways. But generally, the average white bar has paid back most of their debt after about 20 years. And that allows them to be able to convert, you know, student loan payments into wealth to be able to purchase a home to save for retirement, all the important things in life that you need that money to do, and that costly student loan payments on a monthly basis prevent you from being able to perform. The average black bar across the same amount of time, you know, still has, you know, most of their debt, 95% of their debt still, which still needs to be paid. Black women hold a disproportionate share of student loan debt. Black women borrow an average or at the median about $38,000 for their undergraduate education. And this is higher than the about 25 or $26,000 across borrowers overall. The part about student loan debt that I want to raise for us and elevate today has to do with something called asset backed securities. So the image that I think of when I think about securitization is this image of hay or straw. You know, farmers do not sell straw as individual kind of strands or stalk. They bundle them together. And this illustrates how banks and lenders convert student loan debt into profits for investors. So by design of the system, investors can earn profits that borrowers don't ever see debt that borrowers, especially black and brown borrowers spend a lifetime repaying. My colleague Kristen Seafelt writes about debt as a form of sharecropping. And so fintech does not alter this system. It makes it operate more efficiently and can help banks to create the conditions so that they're winning and profiting in many different ways. As I mentioned, we think about our debt, our household debt as a negative. But for banks on banks balance sheets, that is a positive. It's an asset. It's a profit. And one of the reasons that that operates this way for banks is because they can sell off that debt to investors. And securitization is the process of bundling individual lines of debt together under the idea that if we pull everything together that will reduce risk. And then those bundles can be sold. Most debt is securitized. But student loan debt has some unique features and that's why I want to raise it for us today. So student loan debt, student loans they're insured by the federal government. So we publicly support student loans and therefore securitization and the asset backed securities that are able to be created from that 92% of student loans are federally insured and about 80% of student loan asset backed securities, these bundles benefit from government insurance. So this implies that that federal dollars or public monies are being used to help guarantee the profits to banks and to wealthy investors. There are strict bankruptcy laws that make it different difficult for borrowers to discharge this debt. And some of this is changing because bankruptcy judges are increasingly realizing that that monthly student loan payments are burdensome and they are hardships. Defaulting on student loans comes with consequences. Banks and lenders can report borrowers to credit bureaus for nonpayment. They can sue borrowers to compel their payments and they can directly garnish borrowers wages from paychecks and from social security checks. So student loan asset backed securities are lucrative in part because their profits to investors are nearly guaranteed even when borrowers default. And so unlike other types of securities like mortgage backed securities where wealthier and whiter investors assume a good share of the risk. Student loan asset backed securities shift those burdens onto lenders or onto borrowers. And so in part through government insurance banks and wealthy investors keep the profits while borrowers pay the penalties. The penalties are levied more and more acutely onto black and brown borrowers because as we've seen black borrowers take out more student loans they repay their debts plus interest over longer periods of time and they experience comparatively higher default rates. So student loan asset backed securities generate their profits disproportionately from black and brown borrowers debts for whiter and wealthier investors. What does FinTech have to offer this dynamic? Banks and lenders are increasingly using institution facing FinTech to enable securitization and investments. So when we think of you know when we think of how FinTech can be used to help a student loan borrower take out a lower interest rate loan or take out a loan from an online lender. We we miss you know that FinTech that is people facing. We miss how FinTech is also you know enabling wealthy investors to profit offer off of people's pain and people's really costly student loan debt. So FinTech does not change these dynamics under racial capitalism. I think FinTech can make these dynamics just more precise and more exacting particularly if we only focused on one side of the equation. The second example is is the nexus between climate change and Wall Street hedge funds or private equity firms that are buying up homes and properties and apartment complexes and then becoming landlords. So this is chapter four corporate landlords in the climate crisis. And this chapter deals with the fact that we are in the Anthropocene or the idea that we have entered the geological epic epic where you know humans have the predominant influence on the earth and human activity is causing catastrophic weather disasters. And to talk through this I'm going to move us to Lumberton, North Carolina because the city of Lumberton was devastated from two different hurricanes one in 2016 and the other in 2018 hurricanes Matthew and Florence that both brought record levels of flooding. And so you know much of our housing development, our zoning laws are floodplains or insurance policies. These have all been developed around weather disasters from the last few decades or from the data that we had previously that we've collected. But regions of the country like Lumberton are increasingly seeing 500 year and 1000 year weather events every few years. So we're not our models and our society generally is not really organized for the future. The climate change is bringing. But in 2016 hurricane Matthew brought brought significant flooding to Lumberton and there was a technical report commissioned by the city that that found that if the town built floodgates to close a gap created by a railroad underpass that exposed the town to the river, that this would reduce flooding. CSX unfortunately own the railroad tracks running beneath this underpass and they refuse to allow the floodgates to be built. So the flood floodgates did not get built. I should say at this point that 37% of Lumberton's residents are black, 13% are native and 10% are Latino and the remainder the remaining 39% are white. About 36% of Lumberton residents have incomes that are below the poverty line. So in 2018 hurricane Florence was approaching and the town wanted to build sandbag walls in the location where the floodgates should have been. And again CSX repeatedly like denied these requests and they would not allow the sandbag walls to be built. And they threaten lawsuits for people who trespassed and tried to build them. But eventually the governor signed an executive order of allowing this to happen. But you know this approval came late. It came when the hurricane was just a few hours away and Lumberton was flooded again by hurricane Florence. And again, it was estimated that 80% of the flooding would have been reduced or eliminated had the floodgates been built. So we can see you know folks in Lumberton who are you know scrambling at the last minute to build some of this you know some of the sandbag wall that that ultimately caved and flooded most of the town. Now we know that our built environment is not random. So people across racial groups do not have equal access of experiencing the consequences of extreme weather and that in that devastation. So redlining segregation ongoing discriminatory lending and real estate practices enable white people to buy a greater distance between themselves and this extreme weather that's happening. And in fact, there's there's evidence suggesting that white households gain wealth. When after weather disasters have occurred in part through the FEMA aid that's funneled into those communities. On average between 1999 and 2013 white households had gained an average about of about $126,000 in wealth in communities that has had experience devastation. And of course, this is in contrast to the wealth lost by black and brown households in those same places. So black and brown peoples disproportionately bear the burdens of environmental hazards of weather disasters. And in Lumberton black and brown residents were displaced from their homes at a rate that was three to six times greater than that of white residents. The Lumberton rental market shrunk by about 25%. And so at the same time, the climate change is happening, whether disasters are happening. Wall Street investors like hedge funds, private equity firm, banks, they have been buying up properties, properties that were foreclosed during the Great Recession properties that have been damaged or devalued. And while this example in Lumberton is focused in the United States, this is really a global concern. There was a Florida based investment company called Time Out Communities that had been buying up properties in Lumberton that were damaged by the first hurricane, Hurricane Matthew. And then they began opening mobile home parks for residents that had been displaced. Time Out Communities owns 19 mobile home parks in Lumberton, and they have about 1200 lots. So after the hurricane, after Hurricane Florence, Time Out's mobile home parks again received more residents who were displaced. And then the corporation started raising rents. So residents, disproportionately black and brown residents having recently been displaced, some by multiple hurricanes, thought housing in these mobile home parks that have become a replacement for the housing stock that was lost through the damage. But some residents saw their monthly rents triple when Time Out Communities began raising these rents. Residents who complained received eviction notices and were evicted and so then Time Out Communities began evicting and creating additional housing precarity for those who were living in Lumberton. And so as a renter, to whom do you appeal for justice when your landlord is a private equity firm or a hedge fund? And what does fintech have to offer this dynamic? So private hedge funds and equity firms are also increasingly using fintech like algorithms and artificial intelligence to identify profitable investment opportunities, including for closed homes, including apartment complexes, and including in distressed markets. So fintech helps in these cases, wealthy investors profit off of disasters and people's devastation. While private equity is using fintech to concentrate wealth and power on one side, our policy responses to the people of Lumberton tend to be, you know, using the people facing fintech tend to be things like a financial education class or an app that manages income flows, or as Senator Loomis suggested, to invest in Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency that's also being critiqued for its potentially harmful environmental impacts, including energy consumption. So I'm being a little facetious here because I don't know of an example of where, you know, someone, you know, sought out the residents of Lumberton and offered them a financial education class, but I also would not be surprised to learn if that happened. And so our responses, you know, often really missed the level of real need and the real lived experiences of people on the ground. And so I hope we, you know, can realize how extremely inadequate and even absurd some of those responses can be to the residents of Lumberton or the residents of Texas who just recently experienced their own extreme weather or residents of Jackson Mississippi or Flint, Michigan, who still do not have clean water in their homes. Timeout communities in Lumberton is a microcosm of what's happening across the country. So this is not the only example. There are a number of samples across the country and worldwide. Just like securitization helps bundle student loan debt and sell that debt for profit. Corporate landlords come in and scoop up properties and housing in bulk. We're already seeing reports that that corporate or Wall Street landlords are poised to profit from the current crises where we're expecting mass evictions and foreclosures. And so as a result of the climate change induced global pandemic and a limited government response, people can't pay their mortgages. Banks and lenders were foreclosed on homes. Private equity can buy up those properties in bulk, manage them as rentals and then possibly create the conditions to institutionalize housing precarity on a really enormous scale. So I want us to consider the ways that fintech can be complicit in this, especially as our weather disasters become more frequent and they get worse. Individualizing fintech to focus on mobile banking or a life hack for managing income flows, we can overlook how fintech may be helping to concentrate power in these other ways and may even be kind of directly contributing to some of these environmental harms. And again, when I first approached this topic, I was thinking of a very kind of person facing idea or notion of fintech and also specifically thinking about things like high speed internet access. But there is much else to be aware of, I think, within the realm of fintech. I think when we sanction fintech for things like mobile banking, I worry that we are also inadvertently giving implicit permission kind of for the rest of fintech and our language like the common definition of fintech is defined as a set of technologies. So the language around fintech that we use indicates this potential to flatten and to lump together. And I think some of that should be concerning. And this is the sleight of hand, how promises of financial inclusion for racially marginalized groups are proffered up as this potential positive and understanding these individual critiques I think help us peer into the rest of the ways that the financial system can use fintech to stack the deck. We're also led to believe sometimes that the expansion of fintech is inevitable and that we should accept this inevitability. And in this process, perhaps, you know, we forget or we allow ourselves to forget or to look away from some of the harms that fintech can cause. And so while the examples that I have shared may sound dire, I actually think that there's a good bit of hope that our financial system can indeed operate differently. Fintech won't bring about the types of changes or revolutions that are really needed to make banking more inclusive or more equitable. But there are groups of people who are working to transform the system in some really beautiful ways. And so public banking is a movement that I think is pretty exciting and is happening right now. And I write about this in the book's concluding chapter. Native and indigenous communities for a long time have advocated for divesting from environmentally harmful development projects from pulling money out of banks that finance things like the Dakota Access Pipeline as one example that's been relatively prominent in the news. But there are, you know, 34 and growing public banking movements across the United States, where public banking coalitions are active, they're expanding, they are passing legislation to make public banks possible. I've learned a good bit from my colleague Amaya Pawar that public banking legislation would allow about five trillion public dollars. So so collectively states and local governments have about five trillion public dollars from pension funds, from tax revenues invested in private banks. That could be pulled out and located in a public bank that returns money to communities, returns the profits to communities instead of, you know, private banks, wealthy shareholders. But I think these movements are demonstrating that our institutions are not intractable. They don't have to be enduring. And this is the message that I want to end on, that these people led movements with anti-racism, with justice, with equity at their core, movements that are questioning the concentrations of power and the concentrations of wealth that are concerned about hyper surveillance, rooting out anti-black racism, and the turning over of our public lives to private banks and proprietary algorithms. So I think movements of people can help us imagine and realize the different financial and economic futures that are possible. Technology is often like position does futurist, but it isn't inherently so just because it's, you know, we often see it prominently depicted in sci-fi genre or in our own imaginations of the future. It's not necessarily futurist from an understanding of future as space and time. Technology is something that can exist in that space and time. But financial technologies that exact kind of old harms in new ways do not have to be an inevitable part of our financial system moving forward into the future. And I think people led movements can help us really understand the contours of time and space and what we might want to exist there and see that there are other kind of better ways of organizing our financial system and of building more equitable financial futures. So with that, that's the conclusion on my talk. Thank you very much. And I'll stop sharing my screen and turn it over to Justin for question. Thank you so much, Terry. That was great. And if people in the audience have any questions, you can either message me privately or I think there's like a little hand raising tool on zoom and you can do that and I'll just call on you and then read your question. But to start off, we, we had a couple of questions about initiatives that are black owned or social justice oriented that are trying to use fintech for good. One mentioned was Greenwood, which I'm not sure if you've heard of that, I'm not sure what that is. But so yeah, so just kind of like maybe general thoughts on like those initiatives and how we might think about some of those things, you know, I know there's like some of the big companies that will dive into that, you know, in Detroit and familiar with some of the organizations that use that type of language, but to get your thoughts on that. Yeah, I think that's a good question because it's easy to create kind of firm categorized by condomizations, you know, about like good and bad. And I think there are some really good examples. And I'm I'm slightly familiar with Greenwood, but examples where, you know, people are working to move the financial system in a different way. And some of that is fintech based. And and I think those efforts that are rooted in ideas of a more equitable, a more a more fair and more justice system are part of the steps along a path to a financial system that is better than the one that we currently have. So so if we think about, you know, a long continuum of change in the financial system, there are all these little steps happening, I think, that are that are pushing it, pushing to make it a little bit better, a little bit different, a little bit more equitable. And fintech is involved in some of those steps. And so. And so I think, you know, those examples of fintech are hopeful and important and useful and and that we want to learn from them. While simultaneously knowing that there is this whole other fintech. That that may be trying to do something different. And so so how do we not let that kind of undermine the good work that that those groups are doing? I hope that gives justice to the question. Yeah, thank you. And then kind of a related question I have here. And the question is about the question is about kind of financial institutions and others kind of adopting language about structural change and about like changing the system. And how we might like and how like I know your background is as a social worker and how like social workers might like try to engage with that or how like social workers might better engage with financial conversations and and conversations about financial systems. Well, I would love to talk about the social workers who are interested in thinking about that. You know, it's not an area where we think there are many social workers working. I think we might underestimate the presence of organizers and activists and and folks who are social work aligned doing this work. I think institutions and our financial and economic systems in some ways are intentionally opaque, that it seems like it's hard to figure out. And I've learned myself new things every day about how it works. And so. So I encourage you, you know, if you if you relate to that at all, not not quite sure where to jump in that that these are things that you can learn, right, that I have learned about and that there are likely people working around you that would want to learn about them, too. I do not take it face value and institutions kind of statements about, you know, kind of structural changes. I would like to see, you know, to see the evidence where where those are being implemented. Of our large banks and lenders that have made statements about Black Lives Matter and that are that are that have funded a lot of financial inclusion work, you know, while simultaneously engaging in discriminatory lending. So I would like to see there. I'd like to see their proof. Yeah, cool. Thank you. I think we have one time, time for one more question. And it's kind of like a two part here. So it's just about like international efforts, some in international development, some with other countries and things that are happening with FinTech. So it's kind of a two part question. One is like, have you seen other countries that maybe are getting financial empowerment, financial inclusion right in terms of policy? And then the other one that's related is what do you think of some of the FinTech stuff happening in international development, like M-Pesa in Africa or the tech-enabled micro lending? I mean, are those having a serious empowering impact or not? That's a great question. And there's kind of a lot to untangle, I think, in different places that have different, you know, political and economic and cultural context. For example, you know, there was there was good hope a few years ago about like kind of micro lending and empowering women in particular in the southern hemisphere. Carolyn Hussein's both politicized microfinance is a great, great resource for that. We also have seen countries with kind of different sorts of infrastructures. So for the most part, we have a fairly widespread bank branch network with gaps and holes, but it exists kind of across the country, which is not the case in many countries that have stood up kind of mobile banking as an infrastructure for their banking system. And we also see reports, you know, every now and then about the difficulties of financializing and introducing finance in a way that didn't exist previously and that there, you know, are some associated harms possibly with that. Well, thank you. All right, I think we're we're at time. I will say thank you on behalf of the Center on Finance Law and Policy. This was so interesting. I wish we could keep talking for a while. Email. I think I talked too long. Yeah, I talked too long. No, no, this is great. I just, you know, I wish there was more conversations like this happening in communities at the university. So I'm so glad this happened today. So thank you for everyone and check out Terry's book. I've read it. It's fantastic. And thank everybody for attending today's event. You can check out our upcoming events at financelaw policy.umich.edu. Our next month's move bag talk is called the myth of the millionaire mindset, experimental evidence from Filipino entrepreneurs that will be April 1st, April 1st from noon to one. Again, this is a virtual event and that will be Dean Yang who's a professor of public policy and economics. So yeah, thank you again, Professor Friedland. Thank you everyone for attending. Thank you all.