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President Donald Trump is doubling down on “debanking” — a once-niche political issue that now appears deeply personal for him.
While Trump’s at times rocky professional history with Wall Street banks is well-documented, he aligned himself Tuesday with many of his MAGA supporters who claim they’ve been shut out from mainstream finance, telling CNBC that “the banks discriminated against me very badly, and I was very good to the banks.”
Trump was responding to questions about an executive order he is reportedly preparing to sign that would direct bank regulators to investigate whether any financial institutions might have unfairly rejected customers on political or religious grounds.
Let’s unpack what debanking is, and why it’s become a go-to complaint for conservative groups, crypto industry advocates and the president.
What is debanking?
Broadly, debanking is an umbrella term for when a bank turns away a potential customer, which can happen for a ton of reasons. Maybe you’ve got bad credit, say. Or a history of not paying loans. Or associations with criminal enterprises. Or a business model potentially based on selling unregistered securities in a highly volatile and speculative financial ecosystem.
To be clear, Americans don’t have a legal right to a bank account, and it’s not unusual for a bank to reject a person or business they see as risky. And it’s not because banks don’t like a little risk when issuing loans – it’s because they like risk so much, there are now a mountain of laws to protect banks from themselves. After all, we’ve seen how messy it can get when lenders don’t manage their risks effectively. (See: the 2023 Silicon Valley Bank panic, the 2008 financial crisis, the Savings and Loan debacle of the late 80s, et al.)
We could debate how well those laws and regulations work, whether they’re too strict or not strict enough, but the point is: Banks can and do reject customers all the time, for better or worse.
Debanking has long caused problems for undocumented people and poor Americans, who often have to resort to unregulated payday lenders with much higher interest rates to make ends meet.
But more recently, the term has been co-opted by conservative groups that see themselves as victims of a left-wing value system that’s taken root across Corporate America.
Separately, Silicon Valley crypto boosters were also taking up the debanking narrative, claiming that their firms and employees couldn’t get financing or even open checking accounts because of an alleged effort by Biden-era regulators to shut the industry out of mainstream finance. Crypto investor Nic Carter first pitched the the theory, dubbed “Operation Choke Point 2.0,” in 2023 in response to banking regulators issuing public guidance about the risks of dealing with digital assets.
And while it’s true Biden’s regulators were more hostile to the industry than Trump’s, crypto advocates are less keen to acknowledge the reasons for that regulatory crackdown. In 2022, crypto suffered a near-total collapse when a fringe stablecoin set off a “crypto winter” that destroyed $2 trillion in market capitalization over a months-long spiral, culminating in the unraveling of trading platform FTX and its CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, who is now in prison for fraud.
It’s not clear how many conservative groups or crypto startups have been shut out from their banks. Often, their claims are delivered in sweeping, unverifiable statements, and banks don’t comment publicly on individual clients.
Lawmakers say there have been more than 8,000 complaints filed in the past three years claiming improper closing of bank accounts, and nearly 4,000 complaints from individuals and groups being unable to open an account.
‘I’m sorry, sir’
Still, Trump, who has added hundreds of millions of dollars to his personal fortune via crypto, is doubling down on these perceived injustices.
Trump is even inserting himself peronally in the narrative now, accusing JPMorgan Chase of dumping him as a customer following his first term in office.
“I had JPMorgan Chase. I had hundreds of millions of dollars in cash,” he told CNBC on Tuesday. “And they told me, ‘I’m sorry, sir, we can’t have you. You have 20 days to get out.’”
Trump said he then called Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan to deposit “a billion dollars.”
“And he said, ‘We can’t do it. No, we can’t do it.’”
A JPMorgan spokesperson declined to comment about the particulars of Trump’s allegation, while repeating the bank’s contention that it doesn’t close accounts for “political reasons.”
But Bank of America is taking a different strategy. Instead of demurring and defending itself, BofA’s Moynihan — no stranger to being a public punching bag for the president on debanking — responded later Tuesday by interpreting Trump’s invective as a rather broad view about regulatory consistency, instead.
“I think that the president’s on the right issue, which is, we’ve got to stop the regulators behind the scenes whipsawing back and forth and forcing our companies to make decisions which Congress hasn’t passed,” he told CNBC.
But whether the buttoned-up or conciliatory responses are the right tack is still an open question. In a country where Trump has used his various grievances to excise concessions from the media, tech, education, food and baseball industries, banking CEOs might just be the latest ones to try to meet his latest demand.
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