◼ FINANCE Bloomberg Businessweek August 10, 202022 ● An activist rapper brings attention—and customers—
to the few remaining Black-owned financial institutions
Saving America’s
Black Banks
Michael Render, the rapper and activist better
known as Killer Mike, has been saying the same
thing for years: America needs Black banks.
But after George Floyd was killed by police in
Minneapolis, Render is issuing another plea on
behalf of the few Black-owned banks still standing.
Once again, he’s urging fans to #BankBlack.
The campaign has worked—at least on the small,
often precarious scale of Black-owned banks. The
largest one, OneUnited Bank in Boston, quickly
attracted $50 million of new deposits. Yet even with
that additional money, OneUnited is only an aster-
isk in the wider banking industry. JPMorgan Chase
& Co. has more than 150 branches that are each big-
ger than all of OneUnited.
While Wall Street behemoths may be too big
to fail, many Black-owned banks have proven
too small to succeed. Two decades ago, 48 were
open for business. Today there are just 21. Since
the 2008 financial crisis, as the big banks have got-
ten $2 trillion bigger, the combined assets of Black-
owned banks have actually declined.
Amid the nation’s reckoning over race, a pivotal
moment is arriving for Black-owned banks, in the
form of the #BankBlack movement Render helped
set in motion in 2016. The question is whether thosequarters he stocks in his change machines don’t
make it into his washers and dryers. “I average
$100 a day leaving the laundromat, going some-
where else,” he says. “I’m like a minibank. They
get change from me.”
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said in June that
he believed the shortage would be temporary.
The U.S. Mint is increasing production, and the
Federal Reserve formed a coin task force with
industry stakeholders, including Coinstar, to come
up with recommendations on how to fix the flow
of coins.
Suggestions from the Coin Laundry Association
and the National Automatic Merchandising
Association, which represents the vending
machine business, include the Fed distribut-
ing additional coins and prioritizing distribu-
tion to “consumer businesses in the essentialcritical infrastructure workforce.” Another obvi-
ous fix might be to pay people for their now-pre-
cious loose change. For a week ending on July 21,
Wisconsin-based Community State Bank ran a
coin buyback with a $5 bonus for every $100 worth
that customers turned in.
If he can’t find additional quarters, Boukas says
his contingency plan is to take customers’ paper
cash and operate the laundry machines man-
ually. In the meantime, he’s been trying to dis-
suade the people who take his change elsewhere:
“I explained to the apartment dwellers, ‘you come
take coins out of here, you’re putting me out of
business. You are asking me to go to the bank for
you,ina way.’”�MichaelTobinTHE BOTTOM LINE The pandemic has limited coin circulation
in the U.S. more than in other countries and forced American
businesses that rely on loose change to get resourceful.● Killer Mike