Fed's Kocherlakota: Community Development Needed In Native American Regions

Extreme poverty and lack of mobility call for a "sustained and well-coordinated work on community development" in Native American communities, said Narayana Kockerlakota, the president of the Minneapolis Fed, on Friday. In a speech at a Fed conference on income inequality, Kocherlakota noted that areas with Indian reservations rank at the bottom of a national scale in terms of intergenerational economic mobility. "It's not just that incomes have been very low at reservations for decades. We now have large scale and very current evidence of poverty persisting across generations within individual families" in many reservations, he said. Kocherlakota announced that the Minneapolis Fed was establishing a new Center for Indian Country Development to help self-governing communities of American Indians across the country attain their economic goals.