This Week in ESG and Impact Investing

Recently, the Brookings Institution issued a report titled “ Black-owned businesses in U.S. cities: The challenges, solutions, and opportunities for prosperity. ” While we appreciate the effort, the report is flawed in several significant ways.  It opens with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s statement at a MLK day event in 2017. She indicated:  “From Reconstruction, to Jim Crow, to the present day, our economy has never worked fairly for Black Americans —or, really, for any American of color.”  This is, of course, not accurate. As the chart below indicates, the economy has worked well for Asian Americans and is improving the economic standing of Hispanics at a rapid rate. According to the US Census Bureau, “non-Hispanic White householders had a median household wealth of $187,300, compared with $14,100 for Black householders and $31,700 for Hispanic householders. Asian householders had a median household wealth of $206,400, which is not statistically different from the...

William Michael Cunningham October 20, 2013 The partial government shutdown did not impact all businesses equally. My research indicates black-owned businesses were hit harder than most. Many are located in states that receive substantial federal aid, such as Maryland and Virginia, and they tend to be in industries such as health care, administration, transportation, professional services and retail that are sensitive to any decline in federal spending. As a result, these companies can experience a double hit. I estimate there are roughly 1.9 million black-owned businesses in the United States, and they generated $131 billion in 2012. That suggests the monetary impact of the shutdown on their businesses to be $10 million per day. We saw the effects. National parks and federally owned museums closed. Tourism, a major industry in the D.C. area, was, as a result, negatively affected. This impact will be felt for some time, since overseas offices that give visas to foreigners se...

We are conducting a survey of Black Business Conditions as we prepare for our Texas Talks (see above). Note that you do not have to be either in Texas or a Black-owned Business to fill out this survey. In fact, we prefer to have a range of business owners respond. We are, however, specifically focused on the Black business sector in Texas. To view and complete the survey, please go to: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/NCVQLLL Thank you!

We recently gave a talk to the Greater Houston Black Chamber (GHBC), at their monthly Business Luncheon  “2 nd  Tuesday with the Chamber”  on for February 14, 2017. The link at left is to a video of the discussion. I described the current economic environment for black businesses in Houston and provided a forecast for 2017.  "Founded in 1935 as the city’s first African -American civic organization, the GHBC has evolved into an active participant in the City of Houston’s socioeconomic process. The organization is a 501(c) (6), not-for-profit, private, member-driven organization that serves the Greater Houston Area.  The GHBC is dedicated to supporting African-American small businesses in the areas of education, certification and accessing contracting opportunities and capital." See:  https://youtu.be/toYeng7PlRQ

From the Baltimore Sun, March 11, 2010 by Jamie Smith Hopkins "Ideal Federal Savings Bank has until March 31 to find a buyer, a deadline set by the Office of Thrift Supervision after the federal agency determined the small Baltimore institution was undercapitalized. The bank — which opened in 1920 to combat rampant discrimination in lending — is one of the oldest continuously operated black-owned businesses in the country, according to Creative Investment Research, an analyst of minority and women-owned banks." See: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2010-03-11/business/bal-idea-bank-0311_1_federal-agency-women-owned-creative-investment-research