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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.
Plenty of people get power or water cut off for non-payment, which falls a long way short of organised crime and terrorism. Plenty of people have credit bad enough that they can only get power with a prepayment meter. The equivalent is a basic bank account which can't be overdrawn (and therefore doesn't come with a cheque book, only a debit card - with the shift to zero floor limits the number of places that debit card can't be used is now quite low). You can't run a business with a basic bank account, and you can't run a business with electricity off a prepayment meter - in both cases this is both against the rules (the social contract that says regulated businesses can't shun dirty poors only extends to consumer services, not business ones) and impractical given the lack of credit.
The vast majority of business debankings are for credit control reasons, both of the "new information means this business is no longer considered creditworthy" and of the "new information means that this business is of a type which we do not bank because we lack the special skills needed to assess its creditworthiness" types.
The level of protection the banking system offers to normies who are victims of dodgy businesses (including but by no means limited to credit card chargebacks) is only possible because the system tries to keep dodgy businesses out.
You can keep denying it, but the evidence is quite clear that political debankings have been and are being done under the cover of financial reasons.
I agree with you that the number of political debankings strictu sensu (i.e. a banking relationship is ended because the bank finds the client's political views, as opposed to the nature of the client's business, obnoxious) is probably greater than zero. But it is rare, unless you count "debankings" by Paypal. Debanking of disfavoured industries is absolutely a thing, and normally involves a combination of financial and political considerations - they are hard to separate in practice given the modest positive correlation between "chooses to make a living running an antisocial business" and "inclined to dishonesty in their financial dealings" and between "industries my staff don't want to bank" and "industries my non-evil customers don't want me to bank." Sometimes it involves improper regulatory pressure - Operation Chokepoint was very much a thing, and the Biden-era Fed unsuccessfully tried to do something similar with the fossil fuel industry.
The point I am trying to make in my posts is that if you are going to legislate about debanking, your legislation needs to get the common cases right. A law which puts a burden of proof on banks which end a client relationship is, regardless of the sponsors' intent, primarily a law about credit risk management - namely that banks have to do it upfront at the point of account opening. The main impact would be to make it harder for people who are not already rich to open business bank accounts.
It’s stricto sensu
Pesky fourth declension, confusing bad classicists since someone put their hand on their knee.
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Darn fourth declension always messing things up…
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