Читать книгу Financial Adulting - Ashley Feinstein Gerstley - Страница 29

After the Civil War, in 1865, Freedman's Savings Bank was created by the U.S. government for those previously enslaved to deposit money and receive financial education. It's important to remember that previously enslaved Black people were starting with nothing, while white Americans had been building wealth for hundreds of years.

Henry Cooke, a white financier on the board of directors of the bank, used the bank's money to make speculative investments in railroads (Mehrsa calls it the “subprime market of that time”) and the bank eventually went under. More than 61,000 Black Americans lost $72 million¹⁴ in today's money (over half the Black community's accumulated wealth) that was never recovered, despite the bank being protected by the federal government. This incident starts a distrust of the financial system that gets reinforced and lingers for hundreds of years.