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Those are focused on the fear of specific, articulable harm.
It's not something like "this business is dodgy and we don't want to take a risk that they welch on their debts and leave us to make all their customers whole at our expense".
Right, but wasn't @CertainlyWorse arguing that debanking should be done via the courts specifically to ensure that it is only done to prevent specific harms as described by law rather than being left up to the whims of the banks and the social pressure others can exert on them?
Pretty much. I'm sure they could figure out how to walk and chew gum at the same time, which is to create due process to protect against debanking due to social pressure, but still allow for banks to freeze accounts for defaulting and dodgy business practices.
For political requests it gets a bit thornier and requires some nuance. How do you seperate 'illegitimate' govt requests (eg Trucker protests) vs 'legitimate' govt requests (eg financial sanctions on Russia)?
Indeed. And a third category is "predictive" in the sense of Epstein give that he was apparently in government favor until a point where his line went out and then they hung him out to dry.
In some sense, this is kind of the worst of all worlds: dump a politically connected guy today and get flamed by his friends. Keep him and then the moment he's out you'll be smeared along with him. No business wants to be in flapping in the political winds like that.
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I think the majority of those decisions aren’t social pressure, they are vanilla business decisions based on risk.
When does a regular credit decision become a judicial matter?
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