With precious few exceptions, it looks to be a neatly regional phenomenon. We spent hundreds of hours scraping Airbnb listings to determine the true extent of the American South , but we could have saved a lot of time if we’d just drawn a line around the contiguous places with low credit scores. Department of Data The researchers behind the map — Sumit Agarwal of the National University of Singapore, Andrea Presbitero of the International Monetary Fund, and André Silva and Carlo Wix of the Federal Reserve — examined 2019 data from 238 million credit cards and found that rewards programs such as American Express Gold effectively siphon billions of dollars a year from lower-income counties, many of them in the South, and transfer the cash to well-heeled enclaves loaded with professionals who tend to take advantage of such programs. Our first guess about what might be happening here involves race. Almost 3 out of every 5 Black Americans live in the South, and they make up almost 20 percent of the region’s population. Centuries of slavery, sharecropping, apartheid and exclusion from many elite educational institutions left some Southern Black folks with little credit and even less collateral. But […]
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