De-banking

Maybe due to the transaction being illegal, or because it just doesn't want to facilitate certain industries or individuals.

Debanking is a thing, and so censorship-resistant money was and still is a powerful idea.

Bitcoin came out of the cypherpunk movement, which had been working on ways to reimplement the concept of cash on the internet.

That was a very tricky problem which Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever that is, had ingeniously solved.

This is all from a bombshell banking report released yesterday by the federal banking regulator.

The report, entitled the Debanking Review by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, investigated 100,000 complaints and scrutinized 50,000 internal bank records to reveal how customers were debanked based purely on their political, social or religious beliefs.

Those banks that participated included ones that we've talked about before because a number of us have been debanked over the last couple of years.

JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC, TD Bank and BMO Bank were all found to have discriminated against American consumers, citing reputation risk as a reason to deny service between 2020 and 2025.

That's just the reality of it.

Because if this can happen again, if this is truly part of banking policy in Canada, no matter who you bank with, where they see an opinion online, or they see you do something online that they don't agree with, perhaps it's political, perhaps it's religious, who knows what their opinion is, but they choose to not agree with it and suddenly freeze your accounts and believe they have the legal right to do so, are you really in a free country? Can we call Canada f- truly free anymore when that's a possibility? Debanking should be illegal.

And there's another story I want to bring into this conversation before we wrap up.

In January twenty twenty-five, the Globe and Mail published an investigation into Canadians whose bank accounts were being closed, sometimes with very little explanation.

A top US bank regulator issued a report on Wednesday finding that several of the country's largest banks unfairly denied banking services to some clients on political, religious, or other grounds.

The de-banking report from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency covered nine of the nation's largest banks that had policies, uh, let's see here, restricting some clients' access to financial services based on subjective criteria rather than financial risk.

De-banking occurs when banks cut off a account holder's access to services, often because of concerns about legal, financial, or reputational risks.

I, I hate to say this, Kevin, I mean, um, you know this, but a lot of people that are listening may not.

This is not new.

Back once again, let me just mention that we have posted this very good piece that's sort of a summary from our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom, but there's much more where that comes from.

Here is an article from Brittany Bernstein, Nine Major Banks Denied, Debanked, and Discriminated Against Conservatives.

And, of course, that article is one that I've been pointing people to.

Kelly Shackelford appointed me to one that I found after the fact.