What is this monstrosity:

BREAKING: I just made some EXCELLENT broccoli crunch salad.

RT @sunnyright: Imagine saying “This isn't America” and meaning that America has too much free speech and that’s bad.

Regulator driven debanking is definitely a thing. A big thing. But it is highly unlikely it is the ONLY thing.

Political philosophy nerds: what is a catchy name for a political movement centered on the protection of ordered liberty that is not “classical liberalism” and does not include the word “liberal?”.

What do you want to know?.

RT @brianrknight: Banks (or other FIs) justifying debanking various groups or industries because their customers (or employees, or the medi….

A modern-day myth of Sisyphus would involve him having to format a document for a meeting. Each time he made a change, it screwed up something else. When it was finally ready he would convert it to PDF only to see the conversion messed everything up.

RT @realmichaelseif: To read the full letter the CFPB sent us today announcing the end of the Biden-era, weaponized investigation against u….

RT @brianrknight: Is politicized debanking because of regulators or private actors? Why not both? A thread.

RT @SeanMoran3: New: Trump’s CFPB just stopped a Biden-era witch hunt against @officialpsq & Credova, noting that the pre-Trump CFPB invest….

Hopefully the examination prompted by the EO will illuminate what has happened, why, and what can be done to increase transparency and prevent abuse of the financial system by public and private actors.

Given the structural barriers to transparency we can't say the lack of a smoking gun is dispositive, any more than we can say politicized debanking is rampant (except the overt stuff mentioned earlier.).

This often goes for states as well. States can't exercise visitorial powers over/examine national banks. They can sue to enforce laws, but if there is no cause of action available they are as in the dark as the rest of us.

Yes, in theory you could sue, but you first need a cause of action. If you think you were discriminated against because of your industry or your politics that is generally not prohibited by law, so you won't get to discovery.

Many laws and regulations (e.g. BSA) can prohibit banks from telling customers things, but there also aren't great forcing mechanisms to make banks tell customers things, (maybe a Reg. B notice if applicable, but those are often pretty thin.).

There are any number of ways bank employees, with or without management approval, could influence bank decisions for political reasons. I'm not saying it is common, or rare, we don't know. But that shouldn't surprise us given how opaque banking is, by design.

After uproar and threats from state politicians WePay relented, but it's unclear if that would have happened but for the outrage. It's also unclear if the initial decision was by management or a lower level employee imposing their interpretation of "hate" on WePay's customers.

For example, WePay, owned by JPMorgan Chase, cut ties with a conservative PAC planning an event with Donald Trump Jr. citing is prohibition on using the service for promotion of hate.

But there is also the possibility, and I want to stress that word because banking is so opaque there is no smoking gun visible, that there were more subtle debankings driven by politics, such as the belief that certain conservative values could be considered "hateful.".

Many, though not all, of those overt cases have since been walked back (at least superficially), in some cases with an attempt to retcon the political justifications into a decision based on "risk." .