Americans with mortgages have accumulated nearly $10 trillion in home equity thanks to a decade of rising home prices. Yet millions of them have fallen behind on mortgage payments and risk losing their houses.

It is a potential bonanza for rental-home investors. Since the coronavirus pandemic began, big single-family landlords have raised billions of dollars for homebuying sprees.

Even...

Fredericca Smith has already been through a lot in her life. At just 29 years old, she has overcome homelessness, working to get back on her feet with a job at a local warehouse. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, she again fell on hard times when she lost that job.

THE COMMITTEE ON BANKING, HOUSING, AND URBAN AFFAIRS will meet REMOTELY to conduct a hearing entitled “The Status of the Federal Reserve Emergency Lending Facilities.”  The witnesses will be: Mr. Hal Scott, President, Committee on Capital Markets Regulation; Mr. Jeffrey D. DeBoer, President and Chief Executive Officer, The Real Estate Roundtable; and The Honorable William Spriggs, Professor of Economics, Howard University and Chief Economist, AFL-CIO.

Pursuant to guidance from the CDC and OAP, Senate office buildings are not open to the public other than official business visitors and credentialed press at this time. Accordingly, in-person visitors cannot be accommodated at this hearing. We encourage the public to utilize the Committee’s livestream of the hearing, available on the website at http://www.banking.senate.gov.

All hearings are webcast live and will not be available until the hearing starts. Individuals with disabilities who require an...

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Of the 327 financial regulators that have been appointed at U.S. federal agencies throughout history, only 10 have been Black. That’s a mere 3%, for a demographic that reflects 13% of the country’s population. Financial regulators are the leaders of national financial agencies, such as the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission, which act as stewards of banks, corporations, and financial markets. These agencies have the purported goal of ensuring fairness for economic participants. But Black people have been largely absent from those policy-making decisions.

As an eviction crisis has seemed increasingly likely this summer, everyone in the housing market has made the same plea to Washington: Send money — lots of it — that would keep renters in their homes and landlords afloat.

City officials have called for such rent relief. So have landlord associations, tenant advocates, legal aid lawyers, housing researchers, public health experts and economists.

Now millions of renters have been covered by a national eviction moratorium, an unprecedented order by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help control the coronavirus pandemic. But there is still no money.

Congress has yet to adopt a new aid package that includes broad rent relief. It hasn’t passed any other cash assistance lately either. Expanded unemployment benefits, worth $600 a week, expired at the end of July, along with a more limited eviction moratorium. There have been no new stimulus checks. And additional unemployment benefits created by...

More than 100 economists, including at least seven Nobel winners, have signed an open letter urging the Senate to reject Federal Reserve nominee Judy Shelton, calling her views “extreme and ill-considered.”

Shelton was nominated for the Fed’s seven-member board of governors by President Donald Trump earlier this year, and the Senate Banking Committee gave her the green light on a party-line vote in July. The full Senate is expected to take up her nomination soon. Shelton was an adviser to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and has criticized the Fed over its interest-rate policy and influence over the U.S. economy. Critics claim she’s too partisan and would endanger the Fed’s independence.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio on Tuesday asked the Office of Special Counsel to investigate whether Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson violated the Hatch Act by using official channels to distribute a Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled “We’ll Protect America’s Suburbs” that Brown contends is overtly partisan.

Judy Shelton testifies before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee during a hearing on their nomination to be member-designate on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors on Feb. 13, 2020. | Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images