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So it appears that JP Morgan may have allowed Jeffrey Epstein to continue using their financial services, so of course the Times leads with the most bombastic possible version of this claim. One could imagine an alternative headline like How JPMorgan Conducted its Usual and Customary Business. Probably there are intermediate versions of this headline that are closer to neutral.
Headlines aside, right wing media is picking it up because all the Epstein stuff draws lots of clicks but I'm wondering (and hopefully I'm not alone) whether this is fundamentally about getting upset when banks don't drop unpopular clients even when their relationship has nothing to do with the clients' bad behavior.
That is to say, contra the Times, JPMorgan didn't enable Epstein's crimes in anything but the most useless sense of the world. Sure, he used money from the banks to pay people -- but I'm sure lots of criminals withdraw money from a Chase ATM in the commission of a crime, which hasn't (till recently) been laid on the bank.
The other claim is that his friends in the bank intervened when some transactions were flagged (for what, no one really explains) but this only deepens the original question: even if he was guilty of sex crimes, that doesn't imply that his financial dealings weren't in order. It's not money laundering or fraud to pay for underage hookers -- it's child prostitution which is illegal in its own right.
Ultimately where this seems to end is back to a place where banks rightly fear that they are gonna be next on the Times' hitlist because they didn't drop a client fast enough.
I don't think people should be debanked at all except for organised crime and terrorism. Even then I would expect justice dept or fintrac officials to make that call and not the banks or credit card companies themselves.
It should be know your client > report suspicious activities to the authorities > authorities ask judge for approval to debank > banks debank.
Not lobby group lobbies visa/mastercard > banks debank or even politicians ask banks to debank for expedient political reasons (Canada Truckers) > Banks debank.
Banks are like power and water utilities. Its not something you cut off in a modern society without very good reasons.
I understand you're just proposing as a thing, but there is literally no analog for a court to adjudicate this. You'd be inventing a new kind of judicial process for this.
What differentiates this procedurally from, for example, the processes surrounding temporary restraining orders or the impounding of weapons based on various red flag laws?
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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