In the wake of the Great Recession, younger workers have had a significant amount of trouble entering the labor force, with unemployment for workers aged 25-34 hitting 10.5 percent back in May. But according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there is a glimmer of hope for younger workers, as their unemployment rate last month hit its lowest level since January 2009:

Jobs for 25-to-34-year-olds increased by 116,000 to 30.5 million in February. Their unemployment rate fell from 9% in January to 8.7%, the lowest since January 2009, according to the Labor Department.

Just as important, the portion of Americans in that age bracket who were employed — known as the employment-to-population ratio — rose to 74.7% from 74.5% and is up from a 29-year low of 73.2% in July. In a normal economy, about 80% of 25-to-34-year-olds have jobs.

Not only has the Great Recession been bad for workers entering the workforce, but as the Economic Policy Institute noted, the entire last decade has essentially been lost in terms of entry-level wages. As this chart shows, the entry level rage of college graduates today is below where it was in 2000:

And the picture is even worse for entry-level workers with just a high school degree. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “The drop in average wages for young adults is in contrast to U.S. government figures showing that average inflation-adjusted hourly wages for production and nonsupervisory workers of all ages and education levels are up 3% from a decade ago.”

Several states have already announced that they plan to use some of the funds they receive from the $25 billion foreclosure fraud settlement for budget items other than helping homeowners, despite that being the purpose of the money. Ohio plans to use some of the funds to demolish vacant homes, while Wisconsin, Vermont, Maryland, and Pennsylvania are contemplating using the money for thing entirely unrelated to housing.

According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Georgia is set to become the latest state to join this list, with Gov. Nathan Deal (R) set to add more than $100 million of the state’s settlement money to Georgia’s rainy day fund:

“The state constitution requires that the money go into the state treasury. The governor would prefer that it go from there to the rainy day fund,” said [Deal spokesman Brian] Robinson.

The rainy day fund is state savings to cover emergencies and hard times.

Of course, one could definitely argue that the hard times are now in terms of Georgia’s housing market. One third of the state’s homes are underwater (meaning the owner owes more on the mortgage than the house is currently worth), the 5th highest percentage in the nation. One in every 328 Georgia housing units received a foreclosure notice in January of this year.

The foreclosure fraud money was not intended to paper over state budget problems, and it certainly wasn’t meant to be stashed away in a state’s rainy day fund to be broken out whenever the governor feels like it. Deal’s decision is reminiscent of when Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) stashed money meant to save education jobs into the Lone Star State’s rainy day fund, earning him a rebuke from Congress.

Some semblance of recovery has blossomed in the American jobs market over the last three months, with more than 200,000 jobs created in each of December, January, and February and the unemployment rate falling to 8.3 percent. The private sector has added jobs for 24 consecutive months, and though the economy is still far from healthy, it has improved markedly from the bottom of the recession.

The vast majority of Americans benefiting from that recovery, however, are white. The black unemployment rate in February was 14.1 percent, and though that is an improvement from the 27-year high it reached in August, the official unemployment rate for blacks barely changed in 2011. The 9.6 percent unemployment rate America experienced during the worst of the recession, in fact, would be a drastic improvement over the black unemployment rate in most of the last 50 years, as Algernon Austin noted at the Economic Policy Institute:

Since 2008, the Black unemployment rate has exceeded 10 percent. My current projections are that the Black unemployment rate will continue to exceed 10 percent through 2015.

The sad fact is that for most of the past 50 years, the Black unemployment rate has been above 10 percent.

The extremely high unemployment rate blacks are currently experiencing is tied to another major drag on the recovery. While the private sector continues to add jobs, the public sector — where one in five blacks find employment — has shed more than 600,000 jobs at the state, local, and federal level, and those layoffs have continued despite the modest recovery.

A report released last week by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed that the total balance of student loans in the U.S. has reached $870 billion, while 27 percent of student loan borrowers are at least 30 days behind on their payments. Since 1985, the cost of college tuition and fees has sextupled.

Average college debt now exceeds $25,000, spurring fear of a “student debt bubble.” And a recent survey of bankruptcy lawyers seems to confirm those fears, as a vast majority of them have seen an increase in clients seeking relief from student loan debt:

According to a recent survey by the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, more than 80 percent of bankruptcy lawyers have seen a substantial increase in the number of clients seeking relief from student loans in recent years.

In most cases, those clients could not meet the federal hardship standards that are necessary to discharge a student loan through bankruptcy proceedings. Instead, many of these parents or guardians who co-signed the student loans face the prospect of losing their life savings, cars or homes to collection agencies for aggressive private lenders.

William Brewer, head of NACBA, has said, “This could very well be the next debt bomb for the U.S. economy” (though it won’t reach the level of the mortgage bubble, due to the sheer size of the U.S. mortgage market).

Student loans are one of the few debts that are not easily discharged in bankruptcy, and restrictions on discharging loans from for-profit colleges have coincided with that industry’s rapid growth (and the student debt that comes along with it). The Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal has suggested undoing some of the restrictions on discharging student loans that were instituted in the 80s and 90s, since “it is hard to see these as anything other than a giant subsidy to private agents.”

The housing crisis created a drop in homeownership rates across the board, but the number of Black and Latino homeowners decreased at a significantly higher level than it did for white Americans. A new report from the Bipartisan Policy Center reveals an astounding drop in homeownership rates among people of color. Specifically, the Black community saw levels of homeownership drop to pre-1990s levels:

Between 2004–2006 and 2010, however, homeownership rates dropped sharply, and more so for Hispanic and black households than for white non-Hispanics. The overall homeownership rate of 65.1 percent in April 2010 was 1.1 percentage points lower than 10 years earlier. Blacks ended the 2010s with a lower homeownership rate, 44.3 percent, than their 1990 rate of 45.2 percent and two percentage points lower than just 10 years earlier… The homeownership rate for black non-Hispanics now lags the white non-Hispanic rate by nearly 28 percentage points, compared with 26 points in 2000 and just less than 25 points in 1990…..

…While the housing crisis has hurt people of all races and ethnicities, it has been devastating for many Hispanic and black families, reducing their median wealth by one half to two-thirds and significantly increasing the number of households with negative net worth.

The correlation between skin color and homeownership is not coincidental; during the housing crisis, Black and Latino homeowners were twice as likely to be foreclosed on. Indeed, in California Black and Latino homeowners are said to make up 50% of foreclosures but only 30% of homeowners.

During the housing crisis, the Center for American Progress found, there were huge racial disparities in the makeup of high-priced lending with banks targeting people of color. One of the banks that received a government bailout, was even accused of having steered people of color toward subprime loans. Undoubtedly, these dubious and racist banking practices led to the homeownership numbers we see today.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is now taking steps to ensure the end of discriminatory lending practices. The damage, however, seems to have been done.

Religious organizations have been at the forefront of the nationwide “Move Your Money” movement, a campaign to get consumers to move their money from Wall Street financial institutions to community banks and credit unions. Before Thanksgiving, churches moved $55 million away from Wall Street banks and pledged to move at least $100 million more. In late February, a San Francisco coalition moved $10 million from Wells Fargo.

More churches are now joining the movement as a way to observe Lent. As congregations across the country observe the period between Ash Wednesday and Easter by sacrificing and repenting, religious leaders are asking big banks that have wrongfully foreclosed on homeowners and exacerbated the pain of the housing crisis to do the same, the New York Times reports:

And [Rev. Ryan Bell] has committed his congregation to one other religious obligation. He is withdrawing the church’s money, several hundred thousand dollars, from its account with the Bank of America. By the April weekend when Christians mourn Jesus’ crucifixion and celebrate his resurrection, Mr. Bell said, he will have moved the assets to a local bank as a protest against Bank of America’s role in mass foreclosures and to issue a call for its repentance.

“To right the wrongs of the world is as much a part of the Lenten experience as to repent ourselves,” Mr. Bell, 40, the pastor of Hollywood Adventist Church near Los Angeles said in a phone interview this week. “During this season, when we individually are examining our lives, we think it’s appropriate for the institutions that affect us to examine theirs.”

According to consulting firms, the nation’s 10 biggest banks could lose $185 billion in customer deposits because of customer defections. Bank of America, which could lose $42 billion in deposits, is the most vulnerable, and it has faced pressure from religious organizations to decrease foreclosures and offer more loan modifications. As part of a mortgage settlement with the federal government and state attorneys general, Bank of America will offer 200,000 loan reductions in the coming months.

Bank of America has become a prime target for consumers and Move Your Money campaigns because of questionable and potentially illegal foreclosure practices, including using fraudulent robo-signers, improperly foreclosing on military members, speeding up its rate of foreclosures, and foreclosing on homeowners it had previously approved for modifications. In response, religious leaders like Bell and Rev. Robert Rien, a California priest, have continued efforts to move money away from the bank. “It’s a grain of sand to Bank of America,” Rien, who moved $135,000 from Bank of America, told the New York Times. “But we needed to send a message that you can’t do this to people.”