Kerby Anderson

For more than a year, I have been talking about the phenomenon of “debanking.” Now that the president has issued an executive order, you would think that the issue would be covered more extensively by the legacy press and understood by the public. That is not the case. Even on a recent radio program, I had a guest who didn’t seem to understand why a bank would turn down money someone wanted to put in their bank.

In the past, I have talked about Nigel Farage losing banking privileges because of his involvement in Brexit. Dr. Joseph Mercola lost his business and personal account because of his statements about the Covid vaccine. Marc Andreesen (founder of Netscape) told Joe Rogan in an interview that he knew of 30 tech company founders who had been debanked in the past four years.

Charles Gasparino documents the many attempts to debank Donald Trump after he left office. He reminds us that if any bank can cancel a former president over politics, then every American citizen is in danger of the same mistreatment. Pressure from regulators was all that was necessary to force the former president to find other banks for his business.

Charles Gasparino summarized his concern this way. “I have covered finance for three decades now and thought I saw it all: Bernie Madoff, Epstein, the 2008 financial crisis, Wall Street scandals, penny stock scams and hedge fund implosions. But what happened to Trump in 2021 was truly surprising given the breadth of big banks dropping him as a client and scary given their rationale.”

For now, we have the Trump executive order. But to truly solve this problem, Congress needs to consider Senator Tim Scott’s bill, the Financial Integrity and Regulation Management Act. It will eliminate the use of “reputational risk” as a justification for debanking.