AML = High Costs and Trivial (if any) Benefits

 May 19, 2024 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

I’ve repeatedly complained about the absurdity of anti-money laundering laws and regulations.

• As a libertarian, I don’t like that the government forces banks to spy on customers.
• As an economist, I don’t like that these laws don’t come close to passing a cost-benefit test.
• As a citizen, I don’t like that AML policies divert law enforcement from fighting crime.
• As a humanitarian, I don’t like the way poor people are disproportionately hurt.

Today, let’s cross the Atlantic Ocean to examine some new evidence about why anti-money laundering laws and regulations are misguided.

Looking at the United Kingdom, this chart shows that AML policies impose nearly £35 billion of costs on the economy, which is twice as much as the total budget for policing in the country!

I created the chart, but the numbers come from a new study published by the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs.

The author, Jamie Whyte, compares costs and benefits. The results are not pretty.

…debanking is a problem in the UK. In 2021/22, UK banks closed 343,000 accounts, up from 45,000 in 2017 when the Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information on the Payer) Regulations 2017 (MLR 2017) was passed into law. …Customers whose accounts are not closed also pay a material price, because complying with the government’s anti-money laundering (AML) regulations costs UK banks £34 billion a year, which is double the £17 billion spent on policing all other crimes in the UK… This cost must ultimately be passed on to customers through higher account fees, higher rates of interest on loans, and/or lower interest rates on deposits. …Given the lack of evidence that banks’ post-2017 AML obligations have done anything to reduce crime compared with pre-2017 trends, you might hope that the UK government, and all others, would simply eliminate them. …there is no evidence that the well-known and large costs of AML regulations are offset by their benefits.

Yes, you read correctly. There is no evidence that AML laws and regulations have had any positive effect.

The War on Drugs has been the main excuse for AML policies. Here’s some of what is in the study.

Between 1990 (when the FATF AML regulations began to come into force) and 2021, the number of illegal drug users around the world increased by 60% and the number of deaths attributed to drug use more than doubled. According to a 2023 report by the UK’s National Crime Agency: ‘From January 2022 to December 2022, cocaine prices have dropped by about 30% and heroin prices have fallen by about 33%.

Looks like one half of the Baptists and Bootleggers coalition is doing well.

Here are some of Whyte’s concluding thoughts.

The AML obligations imposed on banks have massive costs and no apparent benefit in reducing crime. The rational response is to abolish them or, at least, to scale them back… This is probably expecting too much of contemporary politicians, who find it difficult to stop regulating and who find it difficult to admit to profound policy errors.

Sadly, American politicians are just as feckless as British politicians. So the bad policies in the United States also seem invulnerable to common-sense changes.

To make a bad situation even worse, policy is like to become more nonsensical thanks to the War on Cash.

P.S. Since the statute of limitations presumably has passed, I can admit that I engaged in money laundering while in London about 10 years ago.

P.P.S. You may not think AML policy lends itself to humor, but here’s an amusing anecdote involving a former President. There’s also a very clever Instagram video from Australia.

Central Banks, Politicians, and Inflation: Part I

October 27, 2023 by Dan Mitchell  @ International Liberty

Most people (though not all) understand that inflation is the result of bad monetary policy.

That’s the easy part to grasp.

What’s more difficult is figuring out why politicians and their central bankers impose bad monetary policy.

1. Are they creating too much money because they want to artificially goose the economy with Keynesian monetary policy, especially during election season?
2. Are they creating too much money because they want to finance more government spending with modern monetary theory, like Turkey, Argentina, or Sri Lanka?

My rule of thumb has been that developed nations make Mistake #1 and developing nations make Mistake #2.

 

But that may be changing because of irresponsible fiscal policy in richer nations.

For instance, the European Central Bank has been propping up Italy, financing a big chunk of that nation’s deficit spending.

And I worry something similar may be happening the United States.

The incentive doesn’t even require a belief in a nutty idea like Modern Monetary Theory. Government can profit from inflation in a more subtle way, as I wrote way back in 2011.

Let’s expand on that column, thanks to a a new study from the International Monetary Fund.

Authored by Daniel Garcia-Macia, it crunches a bunch of data to develop estimates of how governments benefit from unexpected inflation.

This paper has shown that inflation surprises help to reduce deficits temporarily and debt ratios persistently. Deficit-to-GDP ratios decline as the nominal values of the economy’s output and of tax bases generally rise, generating more revenues. …an unexpected bout of inflation will erode part of the real value of government debt persistently, both owing to the initial improvement in fiscal balances and the nominal GDP denominator effect. …Unexpected inflation may offer some breathing room for debt ratios but attempts to keep surprising markets and economic agents have historically proven futile or harmful. …Another important dimension is which budget items are automatically or de facto indexed for inflation and by which mechanism.

Here’s a look at different fiscal variables and how unexpected inflation during a two-year period.

What politicians presumably care about are the first two charts on the first row. You can see that inflation leads to more tax revenue, especially from taxes on income and profits.

I fear that they are less concerned (if at all) about the fact that inflation is bad for taxpayers and bad for the economy.

Sadly, there’s not much people can do to protect themselves from inflation. Unless, of course, we figure out an alternative to central banks.

Central Banks, Politicians, and Inflation: Part II

October 28, 2023 by Dan Mitchell

I wrote yesterday about the two big reasons that central banks – such as the Federal Reserve in Washington – impose misguided monetary policy.

1. They create too much money because they want to artificially goose the economy with Keynesian monetary policy, especially during election season.
2. They create too much money because they want to finance more government spending based on the nutty idea of modern monetary theory (an approach that has failed in places like Turkey, Argentina, or Sri Lanka).

In Part II, let’s consider whether there are ways to block or discourage irresponsible monetary policy.

For hard-core libertarians, the answer is easy. Just abolish the Fed and rely on the private sector to produce competing currencies.

That approach actually used to exist in some nations in the 1800s and earlier, and it has a good track record.

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But don’t hold your breath expecting that kind of radical reform. Politicians are not going to surrender their power over a key variable in the economy.

Another option is a gold standard.

That approach to exist before World War I and also has a good track record.

But it’s also not terrible realistic, especially since there are good reasons to think governments today wouldn’t implement and maintain it in a sensible manner.

So most proponents of good policy today focus on more targeted reforms, most of which are designed to discourage central bankers from imposing inflationary policy.

But not everyone favors anti-inflation policies. In an editorial about various GOP economic proposals, the Washington Post criticizes any limits on the powers of the Federal Reserve.

Even worse is the rising urge to attack the Federal Reserve. While in office, Mr. Trump mused publicly about firing Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy wants to restrict the Fed’s mandate to “stabilize the dollar & nothing more.” Mr. Pence wants to end the Fed’s dual mandate — minimizing inflation and maximizing employment — in favor of an inflation-fighting-only mission. Mr. DeSantis vows to “rein in” the Fed and stop its development of a digital currency. Since the early 20th century, Fed independence has undergirded U.S. prosperity; meddling with the central bank would cause immediate and immense economic harm.

The editorial is wrong. If you want to know whether the Fed has “undergirded U.S. prosperity,” just watch this video and you’ll quickly learn the Fed has been a destabilizing force, producing boom-bust cycles (and the busts are always worse than the booms).

Regarding some of the specific ideas cited in the editorial, Pence and Ramaswamy are right to say that the Fed should focus solely on price stability, which is just another way of saying we should not have Keynesian monetary policy.

And kudos to DeSantis for opposing a central bank digital currency. Governments would have vast new powers to abuse if cash was eliminated.

P.S. If you want some Fed humor, we have a Who-is-Ben-Bernanke t-shirt, this Fed song parody, some special Federal Reserve toilet paper, Ben Bernanke’s hacked Facebook page, and the famous “Ben Bernank” video.

Nigel Farage and The Banking World Update

By Rich Kozlovich

On July 19th, Kurt Zindulka published this article, Nigel Farage Debanked over Ties to Donald Trump and for Expressing Conservative Views, Bank Docs Show, saying:

Nigel ‘Mr Brexit’ Farage had his bank account shut down as a result of his ties to former President Donald Trump, tennis star Novak Djokovic, seemingly spurious accusations of ties to Russia, and his positions on Brexit, vaccines, LGBT issues, and others which were deemed by Coutts bank to “not align with our values”.  Contrary to reports in the BBC and the Financial Times, in which an unnamed Coutts bank source claimed that Nigel Farage had fallen below a financial threshold to maintain his account, a subject access request filed by the Brexit leader shows that the main motivation was actually political in nature.

On July 23, 2023 Kurt Zindulka published this piece, Nigel Farage Ups the Ante: Bank Faces £17.5 Million Fine as ‘Mr Brexit’ Files Complaint over Passing Info to BBC saying:

Brexit leader Nigel Farage has filed an official complaint against the NatWest, accusing the bank of passing his information to the BBC, which initially claimed that he lost his account with Coutts for financial reasons before backtracking to acknowledge that the decision was made in part due to political reasons.........

I followed up with this piece, Leftists Love Blacklists. Whodathunkit!, saying:

Farage is now intending to make this a massive public, political, and moral issue to challenge Big Corporate tyranny and corruption............. it's clear this was a planned, organized and implemented conspiracy among Britain's banking industry to censor and punish political speech, association, and views they disprove of.   A conspiracy in which there clearly must have been a lot of communication between the officers of these banks.  In America that would make it a criminal conspiracy, and a RICO violation.

Yesterday, August 1, 2024, Kurt Zindulka followed up with this piece,  Bank Bends the Knee to Farage: Cancels Closure of Account in Desperate Bid to End Growing Scandal saying:

In an apparent attempt to quell the political firestorm sweeping through the banking sector over its politically-inspired decision to debank Nigel Farage, Coutts Bank now says it will cancel its closure of the Brexit leader’s accounts..............Mr Farage said that while he appreciated the overture from Coutts, he has no intention of giving up the campaign he has begun against the banking industry, having launched a website to organise those who have also been unjustly debanked to campaign for change in Britain.  Most of these people aren’t in my position, they haven’t got the platform, they haven’t got the opportunity to fight back........So if I can speak up for all of those people, we can deal with this nonsense. If we can get ultimately to the position where having a bank account becomes a right in our country, because you can’t function otherwise in the 21st century without it, that would be a real victory.  And that’s where I want to get to. Let’s get politics out of banking, let’s get prejudice out of banking.”

Now that Farage has taken this public, and it's created quite a stir, most importantly, he's not taking this, "Oh, we're so sorry, we'll fix this and it won't happen again" clabber.  He want a face to face sit down with the top executives of these banks and an outright exposition of the facts saying:

“I want you to accept that you’ve taken up an inordinate amount of my time. You’ve cost me a great deal of money in legal fees already, which I’ve used all the way through to make sure that I was dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s,.......But more important than all of that, I want to know how many other people had accounts closed at NatWest and Coutts because of their opinions. And what can we do to make sure that nothing like this ever happens to anybody else in your banking group again?”

The article goes on to point out that are "some 90,000 people in the country are believed to have been designated as “politically exposed persons” by the banks".  

I hope to keep following this as this is the tip of the iceberg regarding an effort to force humanity into obedience to a ruling elite through economic restrictions.  Including cashless societies.

Leftists Love Blacklists. Whodathunkit!

“Americans are free people and we do not take infringements upon our liberties lightly. The time has come for resistance and to reclaim our God-given right to free expression. Under my Free Speech Protection Act the government will no longer be able to cloak itself in secrecy to undermine the First Amendment rights of Americans.”  Senator Ron Paul.

By Rich Kozlovich

The term blacklisting was popularized going back to the days when the House on Un-American Activities Committee created a list of Hollywood notables who refused to testify at the hearings to expose communists in Hollywood.   The Hollywood moguls refuse to hire any of them, and others they believed were communists, or supporters of the communist party.   

From the infamous Hollywood ten, the blacklist grew to about 150 and combined with the "graylist" of suspected communists it encompassed around 500 people.  While that clearly got out of hand, the fact is a great many of them really were communists, and all communists were expected to be agents of the party in support of the Soviet Union, and all those who refused to testify knew the communist party, and it's members, were actively working to destroy America.  There's no such thing as an innocent communist! 

“Communism is not an alternative way of thinking.  It’s the world’s deadliest ideology.”  Jonathon P. Myers,

We now know that's true from the release of the VENONA intercepts in 1996.  Oh, by the way, McCarthy didn't have a thing to do with the Hollywood crowd, he was in the Senate and they went after the communists that infiltrated the federal government, and there were a ton of them.  It's been claimed the FDR administration was the most heavily infiltrated government in the history of the world.  It was the House on Un-American Activity Committee (HUAC), run by the Democrats, that went after Hollywood.  The Democrat party of today isn't the Democrat party of your grandfather.  

While many of the Hollywood crowd refused to cooperate with HUAC, they railed against blacklisting, but had no problem ostracizing those who did cooperate with the committee and who testified about those they knew were communists.  I think you can reasonably call that blacklisting.  

Yet, these were the same people who supported Stalin and the communists of the USSR who were among the greatest "blacklisters" of all time, which taking the concept of blacklisting to it's extreme, included murdering and starving to death millions of Soviet citizens, imprisoning millions more in gulags, and millions more who were exiled to remote and hostile regions of  Soviet Russia.  They didn't just lose their jobs, they lost their lives in one way or another.   And the Hollywood crowd who were outraged at the blacklist never uttered a peep in protest.  In fact, the New York Times, through Walter Duranty, claimed none of that was happening, while in fact, they knew it was happening, and that Walter Duranty was a degenerate and a liar.  As we read this keep that in mind.

Most aren't old enough to remember those days of Hollywood blacklisting.  Days the current crop of Hollywood elites rail against unendingly.   But, did you know big corporations have black lists?  Did you know the left wants those blacklists?  Did you know the left love these corporations for it? Let's explore this.

On July 23, 2023 Kurt Zindulka published this piece, Nigel Farage Ups the Ante: Bank Faces £17.5 Million Fine as ‘Mr Brexit’ Files Complaint over Passing Info to BBC saying:

Brexit leader Nigel Farage has filed an official complaint against the NatWest, accusing the bank of passing his information to the BBC, which initially claimed that he lost his account with Coutts for financial reasons before backtracking to acknowledge that the decision was made in part due to political reasons.........

They claimed he was "debanked" because his account dropped below a certain amount, yet when this went public others came forward to say their accounts were below that number and they weren't debanked.  We now know their claimed reason was a lie.  

He was debanked for his political views, because those views "violated their values", secret values, just like the secret "community standards"  the social media subscribe to when they delete posts and ban people from their sites.

It also appears this must have been a national corporate conspiracy to violate British law, how else can anyone explain how this bank not only cancelled his account, ten others also refused to accept him as a customer?

This bodes some important questions.  

1. How many others has this happened to?  
2. Who decided banks should be investigating the political views of customers and determining if those views are in harmony with their political views?
3. Who at these banks initiated that policy?
4. Would this have become exposed if he hadn't been such a prominent person?  
5. Who leaked this information to the BBC?
   

That's what needs to be investigated.  As you read this it must become apparent there's a gigantic danger to freedom being put into place.   Bankers it seems decided they were going to be the primary tool to whip humanity into obedience.....or else!  And anyone resisting their efforts to silence opponents would have to suffer.  Apparently that's the message the British government is also getting, and in spite of their leftist approach to reality, they don't like it either. 

Kurt Zindulka followed up on this on 27 Jul 2023 with this article, Bank Execs ‘Read Riot Act’ as UK Govt Looks Outlaw Political Debanking in Farage Fallout, saying:

Top executives in the British banking sector were “read the riot act” by the government over the politically inspired debanking of Brexit leader Nigel Farage as Downing Street prepares new legislation to protect freedom of speech from activist financiers.  The fallout of Nigel ‘Mr Brexit’ Farage having his account shut down over expressing his political views, his friendships, and even his Twitter use and the subsequent leaks to the BBC from since departed NatWest banking group Dame Alison Rose continues to intensify, with potentially major ramifications on the future of banking in Britain.

Farage is now intending to make this a massive public, political, and moral issue to challenge Big Corporate tyranny and corruption, and the Economic Secretary to the Treasury and City Minister Andrew Griffith agrees stating:

“It’s not the job of banks to tell us what to think or what political party we should support. The Government’s been extremely clear on this in a democracy that relies upon freedom of expression, and freedom of thought." “That isn’t a legitimate thing for a bank to remove someone’s access to a bank account – a really important building block of society today and that’s what I made clear in the meeting that I held with top bank bosses and the heads of building society’s this morning.”

So, from that meeting alone it's clear this was a planned, organized and implemented conspiracy among Britain's banking industry to censor and punish political speech, association, and views they disprove of.   A conspiracy in which there clearly must have been a lot of communication between the officers of these banks.  In America that would make it a criminal conspiracy, and a RICO violation.  The article goes on to point out banks aren't like ordinary businesses, and especially one such as  NatWest, as "it is still almost 40 per cent owned by the UK taxpayer, and the political and regulatory ramifications of this episode are likely to ripple out for months to come.”

What is the position of the leftist Labour Party?  I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.  It turns out they like blacklists after all.  Imagine that!  They believe banks have every right to censor society.  Of course that's only as long as they're censoring those who oppose them, because:  “In its heart Labour is with the new establishment that likes to tell you what you can do and think.” 

 

 But this can't happen in America!

 

Actually, not only can it happen in America, it's happening in America.  We see this same pattern of thinking, especially in the entertainment, social media, and corporate structures of America promoting whatever is the leftist swill of the moment.  Well, it's happening with banks in America also.   

 

At the same time, private mega-corporations friendly to leftist social engineering, like Chase Bank, are implementing their own "social credit" systems by which they cancel and punish individuals and groups that dissent from various woke agendas, from climate change to LGBTQ to anti-gun activism.........

 

Yet, all the while these World Economic Forum economic catspaws have ignored the human misery, suffering, injustice, and crimes against humanity China's totalitarian government has heaped on their society.  A country that's playing an extremely dangerous game with biological organisms that could potentially wipe out tens of millions of people, and they're doing it right here in America.

 

"Excusing China's totalitarianism and handing the communist nation the keys to enriching itself from lucrative global markets may well prove to have been the most consequential foreign policy error in centuries."

 

We never hear of these banks refusing to do business with those who think China is just a fine and dandy economic partner, a paragon of economic virtue, and the perfect example for governments world wide.  Remarkable!

 

But, as it turns out these same Wokester banks don't want to do business with Trump, because they believe that fiances his run to be President, and the media, while silent of the corruption, degradation, and atrocities perpetrated by leftists,  is more than happy to attack any bank that does business with Trump's organization, and in this case a bank they falsely denigrated saying: 

 

"Then a new partner came to the rescue: a little known, online-only financial firm headquartered in a suburban San Diego office park."

 

On July 28, 2023 Monica Showalter posted this piece, Fake News: Washington Post tries to do a hit job on a non-woke bank that loaned to Trump, saying: 

President Trump has had a lot of ups and downs in his real estate career, which means his relations with banks and credit can be pretty dicey. The matter was made worse for him in the wake of the January 6 protests, where wokester banks outright cut him off.  His Trump Organization financial operation however did find a bank that would loan to his organization, a relatively small bank in San Diego called Axos Bank. and that set the Washington Post scrambling to look for some seedy Biden-style corruption.  They found nothing.

Since it turns out Wokester banks don't want to do business with Trump, they tried to imply this was a political deal, but couldn't find one iota of evidence to show that.  This isn't a bank that plays politics.   

The bank researched the loans to see if they really could be repaid, and to avoid any claims of favoritism, the Trump organization was required to submit more documentation than usual.  The owner,  a Republican, who refuses to put political terms on his loans, makes it clear:

“It wouldn’t matter if I was friends with someone, I’m not going to make a loan that’s no good,”......... “I don’t like anyone that much."

Let's never fail to understand this.  Leftism has no borders, no boundaries, no moral parameters that will not be violated.  In fact, leftism has no moral foundational other than doing whatever it takes to attain enough power to take total control over humanity, with the theme, "you will eat bugs, you have nothing, and you will like it".   

Now that the corruption of these banks has been exposed, they're scrambling like the cockroaches claiming they'll fix this and they're so sorry, it won't happen again, please forgive us.  Baloney!  This has been an insidious criminal scheme that needs prosecuted.  The CEO of NatWest has resigned, but the CEO's and the entire board of directors of this bank and each and every bank that's participated in this conspiracy needs to be investigated, fined, sued personally, and prosecuted for the deliberate criminal violation his rights, and the rights of all the others they've violated.  

 

As the EPA used to say, there's no training as good as a good civil penalty.   Well, criminal penalties will double down on that, and that's a lesson that needs to reverberate throughout Leftdom. 

  

Americans have been giving up our Constitutionally guaranteed rights going back to the FDR administration.  Americans are failing to acknowledge our liberties are dying, and the  Constitution is in dire need of protection:

That greed and lust for power is the defining characteristic of what we call the Swamp. And it was enabled by a plethora of acts that strengthened and emboldened the apparatchiks who man it. These included Executive Orders by JFK and Nixon giving federal employees powers or “protections” they’d never previously had, as well as a 1984 Supreme Court case that required courts to defer to federal agencies as it relates to rule-making when there is ambiguity in the legislation.

Western civilization is at that proverbial fork in the road, and is going to have to decide which way it will go. Tyranny or freedom?  I'm not optimistic.  

CBDCs are Coming! CBDCs are Coming! – Swamponomics

CBDCs arriving soon, oil supply deficits, and shrinking bank lending.

By Andrew Moran July 18, 2023 @ Liberty Nation News

Governments and central banks worldwide are bullish on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). They will be the new normal in the coming years. At first, these digital currencies will complement physical money, marketed as a benign scheme to compete on the international stage and prevent China from ruling the world. As the years go by, CBDCs will put the kibosh on cold hard cash, serving as a functional surveillance tool – and that future may not be too far away.

Invasion of the CBDCs

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), a financial institution owned by member central banks, released the results of its December survey of 86 central banks. The study determined if they were working on the two types of CBDCs (retail, wholesale, or both), how the work is coming along, and what their motivations are for devising such a technology. BIS researchers learned that half are launching experiments for pilot CBDCs, with one-quarter beginning to pilot retail CBDCs. Not too many were engaged in wholesale CBDCs.

The most notable finding from the July 2023 report was that as many as 24 CBDCs could go live by 2030, buoyed by many developing economies that are itching for an advantage. By comparison, there are only a handful of CBDCs in circulation today: the Bahamas, China, Eastern Caribbean, Jamaica, and Nigeria.

“More than 80% of central banks see potential value in having both a retail CBDC and a fast payment system, mostly because a retail CBDC has specific properties and may offer additional features,” BIS wrote in the report. “The survey suggests that there could be 15 retail and nine wholesale CBDCs publicly circulating in 2030.”

In 2023, many advanced markets have been experimenting with CBDCs, such as Japan and Russia. The US, Europe, and the UK are still in the research phase of the process. Future generations, whether in America or overseas, will suffer the consequences of introducing government-approved digital currencies. For now, based on various polling, the public is adamantly opposed to CBDCs and the countries that have launched these digitized versions are seeing little adoption.

Got Oil?

The second half of 2023 will be a compelling time for international energy markets, particularly crude oil. Investors might not be showing concern, but there are growing expectations that a vast oil supply deficit is looming, as many producers have reduced output volumes. The only event that could prevent this from occurring is a worldwide recession. But who even knows if this will transpire?

According to the US Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Short-Term Energy Outlook, oil demand will exceed supply in the year’s second half. In addition, the EIA anticipates that inventories will maintain a steady decline over the next five quarters. This, of course, will raise energy costs, with Brent, the international benchmark for oil prices, projected to climb to $81 per barrel this year and $84 a barrel in 2024.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) noted that global crude demand was robust enough to contribute to tighter stockpiles from July to December. While China’s economic recovery has been disappointing, the IEA says consumption trends remain strong. “Even in sluggish economic growth, China and other developing countries’ demand is strong,” IEA chief Fatih Birol told Reuters. “Taken together with the production cuts coming from key producing countries, we still believe that we may see tightness in the market in the second half of this year.”

Since the sharp selloff last month, crude oil prices have rebounded. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and Brent have climbed nearly 6% this month to $76 and $80, respectively. Unfortunately, this could contribute to a higher headline inflation rate and bolster gasoline prices, which have surged close to 11% year-to-date.

Dude, Where’s My Banking Data?

The Federal Reserve presented the public with the good, the bad, and the ugly on the H.4.1 and H.8 data front. First, the positive development: US banks have witnessed deposit inflows of $104 billion, the second consecutive weekly jump. The bad news: Large bank loan volumes have diminished for two straight weeks, tumbling about $8 billion. The ugly: The central bank’s Bank Term Funding Program, which was launched after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, rose again after falling in the previous week. The emergency lending facility continued to firm above $100 billion. Suffice it to say, the banking turmoil might be stabilizing, but there is plenty of risks that need to be monitored.

Read More From Andrew Moran

All opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Liberty Nation.

Big banks setting actual loan rates to big businesses based on 'diversity' quotas instead of ability to repay

November 8, 2022 By Monica Showalter

As if America already didn't have enough of what fascism-savvy Argentines call "the corporate republic," we now learn that big banks are conditioning their credit to big businesses based on "diversity" quotas, not creditworthiness.

According to the Washington Free Beacon:

Amid an uptick in race-conscious hiring programs throughout corporate America, many prominent businesses are now writing racial and gender quotas into their credit agreements with banks, tying the cost of borrowing to the companies’ workforce diversity, a Washington Free Beacon analysis found.

The businesses that have struck such agreements include the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, the consulting groups Ernst & Young and AECOM, insurers Prudential and Definity Financial, private equity firms BlackRock and the Carlyle Group, the technology company Trimble, and the telecommunications giant Telefónica.

Over the past two years, each of those companies has secured a lending agreement, known as a credit facility, that links the interest rate charged by banks to the company’s internal diversity targets, creating a financial incentive to meet them. If the business achieves its targets, it won’t have to pay as much interest on the loans it takes out; if it falls short, it is required to pay more.

That's got to be an illegal practice, given that lending money on the basis of skin color, rather than a borrower's capacity to repay, is nothing but naked racial discrimination.........To Read More....

Global Warming, Social Justice and Commercial Tyranny

By Rich Kozlovich

For many years I have been pointing out that Global Warming was a hoax. Back in the early days people just rolled their eyes, snickered and accused those who challenged this insanity as being"deniers".  Okay, I can accept that, as long as we can agree on what they're claiming we're denying.  Years ago an account asked me if I believed in global warming.  I said, "yes, I do, and I also believe in global cooling, I just don't believe mankind has a thing to do with it. "

Did we "deniers" deny the Earth's climate changes?  No!  The Earth's climate has changed over and over again throughout it's existence.  

Did we deny the climate was changing now?  No!  We merely denied the Earth was doomed or that CO2 had anything to do with any climatic changes, and as time went by we stated the warming trend they touted so much stopped, and that stopped 25 years ago. 

 So what were we in denial over?  

We are now denying, and have always denied, CO2 was causing catastrophic climate change and the claim we needed to abandon the use of fossil fuels.  And everything that's happened, and happening now, is evidence we were right.  Their claims have all been horsepucky, as it turns out all these "points of no return" have come and gone, and we're still here!  Imagine that Al Gore and King Charles III! 

Let's face it when it comes to climate predictions, they just about have a monopoly on being wrong, and people are now pretty much ignoring what I call The Thunberg Syndrome, but one might ask,  how could I have been so sure about this from the beginning so many years ago? Well, it was easy. 

Most things aren’t as complicated as they appear, and nothing is ever as it initially appears.....ever. The key to understanding complex problems is having the ability to reduce them to their simplest possible terms. Find the root of the issue and you will find the answer. In this case, as in most cases, the answer lies in history, and when it comes to claims by environmentalists, history taught me they're probably lying.  So I start from there and question everything, and guess what.  Everything they tout usually ends up being lies of commission or lies of omission, and claim of  97% of scientists agree is an excellent example.

First off, we have to start with the understanding the Earth has no “normal” temperature. These scare mongers were asked over and over again:  What's the Earth’s temperature supposed to be? They had no answer because the Earth has been shifting temperatures all over the place for thousands of years. How did that happen? Clearly these are a “normal” cycles, and/or changes. My friend James Marusek discusses these cycles in his article, Solar “Grand Minima” Threat Analysis.

There was one piece of logic I found absolutely compelling. We know that the Medieval and Roman Warming periods were both substantially warmer than today. What caused them? Well, I think it must be concluded they couldn't have been manmade, ergo, these climatic changes must have been normal.  

• Question:  Did any of the terrible things they are predicting for today occur then? 
• Answer:  There's absolutely nothing in the historical record that any of the disasters they are predicting for today  occurred then. 
• Question: If these things didn’t occur then; why should be expect them to occur today? 
• Answer: Clearly the answer is we shouldn’t!
  

I haven’t linked much on Global Warming lately, and I think that's because the truth of this has taken on a life of its own, but something has been happening that made me I realize we need to start harping about this a lot more now.

What we're seeing is a lot of corrosive, tyrannical and what seems to me to be illegal and unconstitutional activity by the Biden administration, being supported by commercial enterprises in an attempt to force America into an acceptance of social engineering and environmental justice demands, with banks even cancelling accounts of those who express views they don't like.

I think we need to become more active is resisting any minor attempt promoting the lie of anthropogenic (man made) climate change.  Notice it's no longer global warming, it's climate change, because again, the warming trend has ended and there's evidence we may be going into a solar minimum, and if so, we'll be experiencing serious levels of cold temperatures.  And unlike the warming patterns of the past where societies thrived as a result of warming, cooling kills.

If we go back to the climate trend of the 70's and start experiencing some really cold weather, they will claim, as they did then, it's humanities fault and we're doomed by another Ice Age which will be unstoppable unless......watch out now.....here it comes......we destroy capitalism!

There's a limit to what can be "achieve[ed] by force with the typical levers of government power, it is now poised to accomplish with nominally public-private enterprise partnerships. This new strategy has confused the conservative and libertarian response. If such heavy-handedness were attached to the arm of the state, free-market organizations and policymakers would mobilize quickly against it. Coming primarily from the private sector, however, has forestalled an effective response to the ESG agenda."

What we're seeing here is Corporate Totalitarianism in the promotion of each and every leftist narrative in existence, all with the intent of forcing "acceptable behavior on humanity.   Behavior that in reality are impositions leftists can't impose by force, at least in America, but that may change, so in the meanwhile, here's what's happening:

• JP Morgan cancelled a religious nonprofit’s checking account, and then demanded a list of their donors as a condition for....now get this....reconsideration.  Not even renewal, reconsideration.   
•  PayPal intended to fine users  $2,500 directly from their accounts if they are found to be spreading “misinformation”, which of course was anything that disagreed with the leftist narrative of the moment, and listed "prohibited activities" such as "sending, posting, or publication of messages, content, or materials under its Acceptable Use Policy."
• Bank of America canceled a popular conservative Twitter users bank account. 
• The World Economic Forum is "weaponizing banking".  
• Here are my
• 19 States to Investigate Banks for ESG-Style Commitment to United Nations Alliance

How insane is it when organizations that have thrived on capitalism are working to destroy capitalism?  Also, who gets to decide what are acceptable views?  Where is that a part of a society that prides itself on free speech, which is protected by law? 

What are these "community standards" they're always touting?  Well, there's a reason they use all these ethereal phrases regarding "their community standards", while at the same time never actually defining their community standards.  That way anything that displeases them at the moment can become a violation of these ill defined elusive standards. 

Here was my experience with LinkedIn. 

• Ya Just Gotta Luv LinkedIn! 
• LinkedIn and Me  
• LinkedIn and Me, Part II 
• LinkedIn and Me, Part III

We have to get this once and for all.  Anyone promoting Anthropogenic Climate Change is either deliberately being fraudulent for personal reasons, a secular semi-pagan religious green fanatic, or, they're as dumb as tree moss. 

I think that sums it up nicely.  Have a good day!

Some Banks And Energy Companies Finally Starting To Get Some Backbone

October 14, 2022 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

There’s nothing like a good energy crisis to bring a dose of reality to climate change and renewable energy fantasies.

It seems like it was barely a few months ago that every big financial institution and every big energy company was completely on board with the crash program to eliminate carbon emissions from the world. In 2021, in the run-up to the Glasgow climate conference, a large group of banks and other financial institutions formed something called the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, or GFANZ, with the mission of using their financial leverage to force the net zero transition on the world. From the GFANZ website:

GFANZ brings together independent, sector-specific alliances to tackle net-zero transition challenges and connects the financial community to the Race to Zero campaign, climate scientists and experts, and civil society.

All the cool kids raced to join up. A list of GFANZ members includes more than 500 major institutions, including essentially all of the largest banks in the world (U.S. members include JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, etc., etc.), not to mention asset managers, insurers, and on and on.

Even more absurd were the pledges of the big oil companies to eliminate their carbon emissions. (From SP Global, September 20, 2021: “Oil majors pledge net zero target, update goals to cut methane, carbon intensity.” Pledgers included all the biggest companies: Exxon, Chevron, BP, Shell, etc., etc.). It’s like they had no idea they are in the oil business. Who us?

Well, now we’re heading into the inevitable energy crunch resulting from this folly (along with lots of destructive government policies), and reality is catching up. At Bloomberg News today the headline is “Banks Try Quiet Quitting on Net Zero.” Suddenly it’s become safe to admit that this was all a big mistake:

Several of the largest banks, including JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley, headed into the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) as members of [GFANZ], a group of roughly 500 financial sector entities [that were] publicly committed . . . to reach net-zero carbon emissions by midcentury. [But] by September [2022][JPMorgan, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley] were [all] among a faction ready to quit, according to sources familiar with the matter.

What happened? Well, with intentionally-created scarcity, fossil fuel prices are now up, and there is lots of money to be made developing resources to sell at high prices:

The revived fortunes of fossil fuels, especially coal, may explain some of the weakened resolve for decarbonization. Global bank lending to fossil fuel companies is up 15%, to over $300 billion, in the first nine months of this year, from the same period in 2021, according to data ­compiled by Bloomberg. This is Wall Street just doing its job: making money. Banks earned more than $1 billion in revenue from fossil lending during the first three quarters, in line with 2021. Why quit business with a booming sector over a distant climate goal?

And then there is the prospect of shareholder lawsuits if you just thumb your nose at profitable business:

Banks may not have originally understood the full litigation risks tied to signing net-zero commitments.

Some of the executives of these companies may have even figured out that intermittent renewable energy sources don’t really work to power a modern economy, although I haven’t seen any of them say exactly that. The one who has gotten closest is Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, who was asked by Representative Rashida Tlaib at a Congressional hearing on September 22 whether he would “commit to stop funding new fossil fuel projects.” He responded: “Absolutely not, and that would be the road to hell for America." Finally, a little backbone.

Further in the backbone category, let us put CEO Michael Wirth of Chevron. Wirth gave an interview yesterday to the Financial Times (behind paywall) that was full of politically incorrect zingers. A few excerpts:

Despite heavy global investment in renewables in the past 20 years, fossil fuels still met about 80 per cent of global demand, and governments had to hold an “honest conversation” about the scale of the energy challenge, Wirth said. . . . “The reality is, [fossil fuel] is what runs the world today. It’s going to run the world tomorrow and five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now.”

Best of all, Wirth said straight out that Chevron was planning to increase oil supply:

[Wirth] rejected the blame attributed to oil companies for providing “a legal product that complies with all the laws”, and for which there was still consumer demand — and reiterated his pledge that Chevron would continue to increase oil supply. “If people want to stop driving, stop flying . . . that’s a choice for society,” he said. “I don’t think most people want to move backwards in terms of their quality of their life . . . our products enable that.”

Right on, Mike! Now that you are out of the closet, maybe some of your peers will be willing to join you.

 

JP Morgan Cancels Religious Nonprofit’s Checking Account, Demands Donor List as Condition for Reconsideration

October 13, 2022 By Debra Heine

JPMorgan Chase & Co reportedly canceled the account of a religious nonprofit organization for unexplained reasons, and said it would only reconsider the decision if the group provided its donor list, and a list of political candidates it intended to support.

The National Committee for Religious Freedom (NCRF) launched on January 18, 2022 “to defend religious freedom for all Americans and all their religious communities by supporting political candidates at the local, state, and national levels—regardless of party affiliation—who support the free exercise of religion,” according to its website.

“Religious freedom is a cornerstone of America’s constitutional democracy and was at the heart of America’s founding,” said CCRF founder Sam Brownback in January. “We are creating the National Committee for Religious Freedom to uphold this fundamental right, so revered by our Founders, by providing a critically needed political response to the ongoing attacks, in law and culture, on America’s First Freedom. ”

In a post at Restoring America, Brownback, a former Republican U.S. senator and governor from Kansas, said that CCRF is “diverse” and “bipartisan,” and represents “people from every faith and walk of life. Its Advisory Board, he noted, “includes members who are Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Latter-Day Saints, and Muslim.”................To Read More.....

China Urges World to Disregard Protesters Storming Banks for Cash

Gabrielle Reyes14 Jul 2022

China’s state-run Global Times claimed on Tuesday that Western media was unnecessarily “hyping” protests by roughly 1,000 people in Zhengzhou, China, on Sunday in which participants demanded several rural banks release millions of dollars of deposits after unceremoniously freezing them in April, ignoring the fact that Chinese security personnel physically abused and injured several demonstrators during the rally.

The Chinese Communist Party-controlled newspaper’s editors the following on July 12:

Chinese experts on Tuesday refuted recent Western media hype over problems with four rural banks in Central China’s Henan Province that have sparked widespread attention as well as swift regulatory actions, noting that the cases are “isolated” and do not represent any nationwide systemic risk and China has the capability to prevent major financial risks after years of efforts to set up a multiple-layered financial risk aversion mechanism.

An estimated 1,000 people participated in a rally outside the Zhengzhou branch of China’s central bank on July 10 to demand the bank release millions of dollars in deposits that were frozen without explanation in April. Several people told various media outlets, including Reuters and the Associated Press (AP), that they were physically assaulted by security personnel associated with the bank and police officers while demonstrating on Sunday........To Read More......

Volcker Rule Curbs Useful, Profitable Proprietary Trading, Not Risky Lending

by Hans Bader on December 11, 2013

The government just approved a regulation called the Volcker Rule to curb proprietary trading by banks — even though such trading did not cause the financial crisis, or lead to massive financial losses by banks and taxpayers the way other, much riskier practices by banks did (like risky mortgage loans, which the Obama administration has pressured banks to once again engage in, in the name of fair lending and affordable housing).

The Wall Street Journal reports:…..To Read More…..