Title: Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Act of 2019
Policy area: Finance and Financial Sector

Summary:
Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Act of 2019
This bill directs the Federal Reserve Board to collect, in specified surveys conducted by the board, data on household assets and debt with respect to respondents' race, ethnicity, tribal affiliation, and ancestral origin.

[Congressional Bills 116th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H.R. 5360 Introduced in House (IH)]

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116th CONGRESS
  1st Session
                                H. R. 5360

  To require the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System to 
     collect more data on race and wealth, and for other purposes.


_______________________________________________________________________


                    IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                            December 9, 2019

 Mrs. Beatty introduced the following bill; which was referred to the 
                    Committee on Financial Services

_______________________________________________________________________

                                 A BILL


 
  To require the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System to 
     collect more data on race and wealth, and for other purposes.

    Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the 
United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

    This Act may be cited as the ``Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Act of 
2019''.

SEC. 2. FINDINGS.

    Congress finds that:
            (1) Between 1983 and 2016, the median Black family saw 
        their wealth drop by more than half after adjusting for 
        inflation, compared to a 33 percent increase for the median 
        White household.
            (2) The Forbes 400 richest Americans own more wealth than 
        all Black households plus a quarter of Latinx households.
            (3) Black families are about 20 times more likely to have 
        zero or negative wealth (37 percent) than they are to have $1 
        million or more in assets (1.9 percent).
            (4) Latinx families are 14 times more likely to have zero 
        or negative wealth (32.8 percent) than they are to reach the 
        millionaire threshold (2.3 percent).
            (5) White families are equally likely to have zero or 
        negative wealth (about 15 percent) as they are to be a 
        millionaire (15 percent).
            (6) The rate of home ownership for Black families is the 
        same today in 2019 as it was before passage of the Fair Housing 
        Act of 1968.
            (7) The racial wealth gap is not an accident or the result 
        of inadvisable financial choices by people of color, rather it 
        is the result of the centuries of policies, programs, Supreme 
        Court decisions and institutional practices that were designed 
        to create barriers or to strip wealth from people of color.
            (8) Adjustments to Black and Latinx education rates, 
        homeownership, savings and employment do not greatly reduce the 
        racial wealth divide due to the structural underpinnings 
        holding the racial wealth divide in place.
            (9) To understand and address the racial wealth gap, many 
        experts believe we need federally funded data collection 
        efforts with the ability to disaggregate sample sizes by race, 
        ethnicity, tribal affiliation, and country of birth.
            (10) Analytical tools like the ``Racial Wealth Audit'' from 
        the Institute on Assets and Social Policy (IASP) and the 
        ``Racial Equity Toolkit'' from the Government Alliance on 
        Racial Equity (GARE) are needed to provide a framework to 
        assess how legislation will widen or narrow the racial wealth 
        divide.
            (11) Changes in individual behavior will not close the 
        racial wealth divide, only structural systemic policy change.

SEC. 3. DATA COLLECTION ON RACE AND WEALTH.

    Section 10 of the Federal Reserve Act (12 U.S.C. 241 et seq.) is 
amended by inserting before paragraph (12) the following:
            ``(11) Data collection on race and wealth.--The Board of 
        Governors of the Federal Reserve System shall, in carrying out 
        any Survey of Consumer Finances or Survey of Household 
        Economics and Decisionmaking, including the collection of 
        localized data, collect information on household assets and 
        debt disaggregated by respondent race, ethnicity, tribal 
        affiliation, and ancestral origin.''.
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