"What has happened to our wealth?": Author Aaron Glantz on the housing crisis and modern redlining

Journalist Aaron Glantz began reporting on the 2007-08 financial crisis around a central question of what happened after families lost their homes to foreclosure. "We have been stuck in this country on this trauma of 2007, 2008, 2009, but here we are in 2019, 10 years have passed … but people don't feel like everything is great," Glantz tells Democracy Now! "We have jobs, but what has happened to our wealth?" His latest book, out Tuesday, is titled “Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream.” It looks at how the Great Recession enriched bankers and investors — including many in Donald Trump's inner circle and some of whom now serve in his cabinet, including current Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin — while decimating the assets of millions of people in the U.S. Banks such as OneWest Bank, formerly run by Mnuchin, concentrated their foreclosures in communities of color, and as the economy improved, they ceased making loans to those communities. OneWest Bank made only three loans to African Americans and 11 loans to Latinx families to buy homes over a five-year period, according to Glantz. Now, he says, every American bank is regulated by Mnuchin, who handpicked deputies of leading banks, which "did not make any loans — hardly any — to communities of color."

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