Realtor handcuffed at house showing, he says it’s because he’s black
Who’s in the right here?
A Michigan realtor and his client were reportedly handcuffed during a showing on Sunday after police officers responded to the house on a report of a break-in.
Realtor Eric Brown says he was taking Roy Thorne and his son through a property in the Grand Rapids suburb of Wyoming when he noticed police were gathering outside. Guns drawn, officers ordered them to exit the home single file with their hands in the air. All three were handcuffed including Thorne’s 15-year-old son.
While Wyoming police claim officers followed procedure (the officers did apologize for their actions and said there have been break-ins in the area), Brown and Thorne felt race was at the heart of the incident.
“The level of the response and the aggressiveness of the response was definitely a take-back. It really threw me back,” Brown said.
While the whole incident only lasted only a few moments, Brown believes it’s left a lasting impact.
“I feel pretty anxious, or nervous or maybe even a little bit scared about what do I do to protect myself if I’m going to show a home and the authorities just get called on a whim like that,” he said. “Am I just automatically the criminal? Because that’s pretty much how we were treated in that situation.”
So, again, who’s in the right here? Shoot us an email and tell us your thoughts.
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More banks delay office return; Credit card balances approach the $1 trillion mark
Last Friday’s Rise&Shred covered how US Bank is the first major financial institution to delay its return-to-office policies.
Now, everyone else is following suit.
Wells Fargo has pushed back plans for employees to return to corporate offices until October in response to the rise in U.S. coronavirus cases.
Last week, Citigroup said that even vaccinated employees would need to wear masks at corporate offices. Tech giants, including Facebook and Alphabet, now mandate that employees who wish to return to offices be vaccinated. Giant asset manager BlackRock also said Thursday that it is pushing office return plans back by a month to October, according to Bloomberg.
Meanwhile, spending is still increasing. Consumer revolving debt – mostly based on credit card balances – gained $17.8 billion on a seasonally adjusted basis in June to $992.2 billion, according to the Fed’s G. 19 consumer credit report released Aug. 6.
In June, credit card balances rose a robust 22% on an annualized basis, on the heels of May’s revised 11.3% gain and April’s revised 1.4% decline. For the second quarter, revolving debt gained 10.7%.
Card balances are now approaching the $1 trillion mark that they dipped below in May 2020, after a long period of growth, primarily due to the pandemic.
Total consumer debt outstanding – which includes student loans and auto loans, as well as revolving debt – gained $37.6 billion to touch $4.3 trillion in June, a 10.6% seasonally adjusted annualized rise.
The Fed also reports that student loan debt outstanding rose to $1.732 trillion at the end of the second quarter, from $1.728 trillion when it last reported this data at the end of the first quarter. And auto loan debt outstanding jumped to $1.282 trillion during the second quarter, from the first quarter’s revised $1.242 trillion.
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Federal Reserve urged to stop mortgage bond buying; interest rate hikes coming in 2023
A prominent Democratic senator, saying he is concerned about inflation, is urging the Federal Reserve to start trimming its monthly bond purchases.
In a letter to Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia said that he had become “increasingly alarmed” that the Fed has continued to buy $120 billion per month in Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities, even with the recession triggered by the COVID pandemic over and “our strong recovery well underway.”
While a number of Republicans have criticized the Fed for not beginning to taper the monthly bond purchases even as signs of inflation pressures mount, Manchin is the first Democrat to raise similar criticism.
In his letter to Powell dated Thursday, Manchin said he was urging the Fed “to immediately reassess our nation’s stance of monetary policy and begin to taper your emergency stimulus response.”
Reduction in the bond buying would signal the start of the Fed’s pullback in support for the economy. The Fed has said that reductions in bond buying would be followed later by the start of increases in the Fed’s benchmark policy rate, which has remained at a record low of zero to 0.25% since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.
Many economists believe the reduction in bond purchases will not start until late this year or early in 2022.
Fed Vice Chairman Richard Clarida said in a speech Wednesday that he believes the economy’s accelerating recovery could allow the central bank to begin considering raising interest rates by early 2023.
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