Closing the Gap: Lending to Underserved Small Businesses

An informative article regarding the challenges minority- owned businesses face was recently published on business.com. According to Dan Blacharski, since the collapse of the housing market in 2008-2009, minorities in the U.S. have been hit disproportionately hard by lenders who are giving mortgages only to the strongest borrowers. The housing crash continues to have repercussions in the minority-owned small business community, for which business loans are increasingly unavailable.

Frequently, these groups of excluded borrowers refer to non-white, non-immigrant citizens with marginal to severe credit woes. In conjunction, the Federal Reserve also reported that 65 percent of domestic banks have tightened lending standards since July of 2008, with the majority of these domestic banks charging more interest for personal and small business loans despite the Fed’s insistence on a near-zero percent policy. The tepid gains we have seen in terms of economic recovery have come at the cost of increasingly tight money, and lending practices that are leaving more and more small and minority-owned businesses out in the cold.

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business.com – Closing the Gap: Lending to Underserved Small Businesses