Part of our mission at FAI is to frame policy and regulatory issues by synthesizing evidence from existing research and generating new evidence where it's lacking.
From Dave Birch's review of Banking the World at The Enlightened Economist:
My favourite quote from the book was that “remittances may promote idleness on the part of recipients.” As the father of a teenage son, I can attest to this, a phenomenon I have observed in my own home. Now that I have sound empirical foundations for doing so, I will be instituting my own economic revolution, starting this weekend.
SEARCH BLOG
STAFF PICKS
The idea for this conversation was born from alarm. At the news that the US Treasury Secretary and the Chair of the Federal Reserve had called a meeting with the CEOs of the twenty largest banks in America to talk about threats to the financial system from emerging frontier AI models, Tim had questions: what about the community banks, the credit unions, and the CDFIs—the financial institutions that serve low-income communities and small businesses in America? When will they be invited to the meetings on how to defend their systems against AIs that can exploit software vulnerabilities with unprecedented ease and speed? And globally, are the regulators in middle-income and developing countries also holding meetings to discuss how they can defend against these threats? Will those meetings include anyone beyond the largest banks?
Small businesses in the US employ nearly two-thirds of workers earning low wages, making them central to both economic mobility and the quality of work itself. Shared Success, launched by Aspen Institute's Economic Opportunities Program with support from the Gates Foundation, is built on the premise that job quality is fundamental to economic resilience, particularly in historically underserved communities. The project worked with 11 community development financial institutions (CDFIs) to embed job quality support into their programming.
NYU Wagner Graduate School
105 E 17th Street
New York, NY 10003
© 2026 Financial Access Initiative
NYU Accessibility Guidelines
Editors’ Note: Hi, Laura and Jonathan here. A few of the pieces this week come from people who spent years up close with how poor households actually handle money, and keep coming back with something more tangled than the story usually told, and more persistent. Tim will be back for the next edition. - Laura Freschi and Jonathan Morduch