The banking industry has largely applauded President Trump’s nomination of Scott Bessent — a hedge fund veteran and former George Soros associate — to lead the Treasury Department, but whether he is able to wield influence in an administration with a markedly anti-establishment bent remains uncertain.

In a closely watched civil rights case, a panel on the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals blocked Fearless Fund from awarding $20,000 grants to businesses owned by Black women while the case is litigated, siding with conservative activist Edward Blum that the grant program is likely discriminatory.

The appeals court disagreed with a federal judge who ruled in September that the lawsuit was unlikely to prevail on First Amendment grounds.

The defeat for the Atlanta firm working to boost scarce venture capital funding for Black women could have sweeping implications for race-based initiatives in the private sector.

More than 150,000 households filed applications in a span of 12 hours for a chance to join New York City’s waiting list for a federal program that subsidizes rent for low-income families.

While roughly 100,000 New York City households currently use the voucher program, known as Section 8, it has long been at maximum capacity, and the waiting list to receive assistance has been locked since 2009.

The portal will be open to receiving new applications until 11:59 p.m. on June 9, said New York City Housing Authority spokesperson Michael Horgan. The city plans to add 200,000 households to the list. Those people would then be eligible for a Section 8 lottery in August, which would choose 1,000 households a month for the program.

When Dinesh Nepal first arrived in the United States in 2010, he had never heard of the term “Asian American.”

He knew that he was of Asian descent. He grew up in a refugee camp in Nepal after his parents were expelled from Bhutan, a landlocked Himalayan nation. And after he moved to Pittsburgh and became a United States citizen, he began calling himself an American.

But it never occurred to him to put those two labels together, even after he and his wife opened a shop selling bubble tea — a Taiwanese specialty that is iconic for Asian Americans.

Long before people develop dementia, they often begin falling behind on mortgage payments, credit card bills and other financial obligations, new research shows.

A team of economists and medical experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Georgetown University combined Medicare records with data from Equifax, the credit bureau, to study how people’s borrowing behavior changed in the years before and after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or a similar disorder.

What they found was striking: Credit scores among people who later develop dementia begin falling sharply long before their disease is formally identified. A year before diagnosis, these people were 17.2 percent more likely to be delinquent on their mortgage payments than before the onset of the disease, and 34.3 percent more likely to be delinquent on their credit card bills. The issues start even earlier: The study finds evidence of people falling behind on their debts five years before diagnosis.

CEOs are raking in fat pay packages as the US stock market booms.

Bosses have always made more money than workers. But the gap between CEOs and employees is growing.

The median CEO in the S&P 500 was paid 196 times as much as the median employee in 2023, according to an analysis by Equilar and The Associated Press.

That’s up from a ratio of 185 in 2022.

The widening divide is driven by the fact that CEO pay — which is closely tied to share prices — is rising notably faster than that of employees. Many workers, in fact, are struggling to keep up with the cost of living.

The jump in 2023 alone was significant. Median total compensation for S&P 500 CEOs (including stock awards) soared to $16.3 million in 2023 — a huge year-over-year increase of 12.6%, compared to just 0.9% in 2022.

Health insurers are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into building new affordable housing units.

Why it matters: The housing affordability crisis is a major health care concern, since housing instability is tied to poorer health. Insurers say their investments will translate to healthier communities, which would also mean less costly enrollees.

• It also comes as the federal government encourages Medicaid experiments that help low-income enrollees cover housing costs.

A Tennessee agency that is supposed to hold accountable and grade the nation’s largest state-sanctioned hospital monopoly awards full credit on dozens of quality-of-care measurements as long as it reports any value — regardless of how its hospitals actually perform.

Ballad Health, a 20-hospital system in northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia, has received A grades and an annual stamp of approval from the Tennessee Department of Health. This has occurred as Ballad hospitals consistently fall short of performance targets established by the state, according to health department documents.

For years, Father Joe’s Villages, a nonprofit homeless services provider and housing developer in Southern California, could reliably count on the insurance premiums for its properties rising up to 10 percent every year.

But this year, the insurance bill hit $4.4 million — quadruple the previous year. And that was on top of a sharp increase in deductibles.

The sudden rate increase was hardly unique. From Rhode Island to Louisiana, and Texas to Washington, developers of affordable housing have been reeling from exponential surges in property insurance premiums.

In a sweeping change that could improve millions of Americans’ ability to own a home or buy a car, the Biden administration on Tuesday proposed a rule to ban medical debt from credit reports.

The rule, announced by Vice President Kamala Harris and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra, comes as President Joe Biden beefs up his efforts to persuade Americans his administration is lowering costs, a chief concern for voters in the upcoming election.

Homes are often families’ largest assets and one of the most effective ways to build wealth, but countless news stories and studies detail just how out of reach homeownership has become. What does that mean for the wealth gap between owners and renters?

The most recent Survey of Consumer Finances data reveal that in 2022, both the median and average wealth gaps have reached historic highs since the data were first collected in 1989:

• In 2022, the median wealth gap between homeowners and renters reached almost $390,000, and the average wealth gap reached over $1,370,000

A federal fair-housing law prohibits discrimination in housing based on race, ethnicity, religion and other factors, like gender identity and disability. That applies to any number of scenarios, in which such discrimination has occurred: a homeowner refusing to negotiate a sale; a landlord failing to make repairs; a mortgage lender denying a loan.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act on April 11, 1968, days after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The law, initially focused on racial discrimination, was the linchpin of the broader Civil Rights Act of 1968 and was later expanded to include other factors.

Many Americans would love to buy a home, but they don’t have tens of thousands of dollars to cover a down payment.

That massive roadblock is being removed by a new zero-percent down mortgage program launched two weeks ago by one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders.

However, the new program, offered by United Wholesale Mortgage, is making some experts nervous about how these loans could backfire on homeowners — especially if home prices stop going to the moon. And for some, it’s bringing back bad memories of the subprime mortgage meltdown that fueled the 2008 financial crisis.

Perched on a hill with a view of the Atlantic Ocean, the condo in Virginia Beach was just what Dr. Raven Baxter wanted. It had a marble fireplace, a private foyer and details like crown molding and wainscoting in its three bedrooms and three bathrooms.

At $749,000, it was within her budget, too. She offered the asking price, which was accepted, and sent over a down payment. And then when she was in escrow earlier this month, her broker called her late at night on May 17, a Friday, with some bad news.

The seller wanted to pull out of the deal.