Civil rights activists have been saying it for years — racism hurts the U.S. economy. The president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Raphael Bostic, agrees.

The first Black leader of a regional Fed Reserve bank, Bostic says the covid-19 pandemic has highlighted racial economic disparities and now is the time to do something about it.

Racism is costing white Americans $2,900 to $4,300 for every man, woman, and child, according to the think tank the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, housed at Rice University. 

Closing the wealth gap not only benefits Black America but all America. By closing the racial wealth gap created by systemic racism, the U.S. GDP could be 4-to-6 percent higher by 2028, according to a recent report by international management consulting firm McKinsey and Company.

“In nominal dollars, consumption and investment will cost the U.S. economy between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion between 2019 and 2028. That is roughly $2,900–$4,300 in GDP per capita,” Kinder Institute reported.

The Fed can correct this gap, Bostic said.

“The Fed has an important role to play. We must be central to this conversation. And increasingly, I think we are,” Bostic said in a speech to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, CNBC reported. “We need to participate in a deeper, more creative reckoning with a history of racial injustice that continues to weaken the economy for all of us.”

Bostic said he anticipates that “it will be some time before we tighten our interest rate stance or pull back strongly from our actions supporting financial functioning,” though he said that he will “heartily support the removal” of the Fed’s low rate policies and lending and liquidity programs it has instituted during the pandemic.

“Our new approach should help minorities, women, and lower-income earners to be more fully connected to the labor market. That will give those traditionally marginalized groups a better opportunity to secure jobs and economic resilience, which for too many of our citizens has been severely tested by the COVID economic downturn,” Bostic said.

In an interview with CBS’s “Face The Nation,” Bostic expanded on the need to close the racial wealth gap. 

“In other segments, things like hotels and restaurants, small businesses in particularly minority and lower-income communities, those places are seeing much more difficult situations,” he said. 

Black Americans have recovered just more than a third of employment lost during the pandemic, The Hill reported. When asked what the U.S. needs to do to combat the widening inequality, Bostic said the Federal Reserve has to “acknowledge that there’s a problem” and “be willing to talk about it.”

“My institution has for a long time not been willing to be out in front to talk about the importance of racial inequalities,” he said. “I actually think that that’s been a mistake.”

Bostic isn’t the only one to think the feds have to attack the wealth gap.

A Federal Reserve-sponsored event called Racism and the Economy, earlier this month led an “unprecedented conversation,” Forbes reported. The discussion was about “the history and present state of racism and the American economy, the role of the Federal Reserve in these issues, and also explored public and private sector solutions that can benefit everyone in our country.”

Atlanta, Boston and Minneapolis districts of the Federal Reserve led the discussion.

“What covid has done,” said keynote speaker Angela Glover Blackwell, founder of PolicyLink, “is to force Americans to look at inequality in wealth and especially in health. Americans are seeing the interconnectedness of what happens in Black, Latinx & indigenous communities and the health and well-being of America.” 

She explained that “people of color are the first to lose their jobs and the last to get them back…. they are being left behind….they are not valued…racism is baked everywhere in America…in our education systems, health, the economy.”

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 73: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin makes the case for why this is a multi-factor rebellion vs. just protests about George Floyd. He discusses the Democratic Party’s sneaky relationship with the police in cities and states under Dem control, and why Joe Biden is a cop and the Steve Jobs of mass incarceration.

Glover Blackwell’s PolicyLink is a national research and action institute advancing racial and economic equity.

“To talk about Black people does not mean to ignore others,” Glover Blackwell said. “The goal has to be anti-racism. In racism, banks have been complicit; they were underwriters of slavery. Plantation owners borrowed from banks; banks repossessed slaves when plantation owners defaulted.” 

So will Biden follow through the suggestions by Fed experts if elected president?

His economic team includes Wall Street executives, progressives as well as former Fed execs such as Sarah Bloom Raskin, who worked under the Obama administration; Lael Brainard, Fed governor and former Obama Treasury official and Roger Ferguson, former vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve and president and CEO of TIAA.

Bostic, president of the Atlanta Fed, may also be tapped for a role in a future Biden administration, Barrons reported.