Racial bias, segregation cost US billions each year, CNN reports

BEIJING -- Deeply entrenched racial bias and segregation are restraining the United States' potential and hampering its economic growth by billions of US dollars a year, CNN has recently reported.

"Racial segregation and bias is costing all Americans," said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics, cited by CNN Business in a recent report.

"If we focus on this issue, and try to address that, it benefits everyone," Zandi said.

Moody's Analytics has found in a recent research that if the country were more racially integrated, that would change its "economic game," and boost its gross domestic product by estimated 0.3 percentage points during the next decade, according to CNN.

Earlier, some financial institutions, like Citigroup, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and the International Monetary Fund, had unveiled reports trying to quantify the effects of the racial wealth gap and disparities in education, housing and investment in the United States.

Those gaps are estimated to have cost the United States a total of 16 trillion dollars in the past two decades, CNN said.