President Donald Trump took aim at some of the largest banks in the U.S. on Thursday, Jan. 23, during his address at the World Economic Forum. While speaking about his early accomplishments and economic agenda, the president accused Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase of refusing business from political conservatives.
During the event in Davos, Switzerland, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan asked Trump about how he planned to sustain economic growth. After answering the question, the president pivoted to the issue of debanking conservatives. Banks have denied these accusations.
“You’ve done a fantastic job,” Trump said to Moynihan. “But I hope you start opening your bank to conservatives because many conservatives complain that the banks are not allowing them to do business within the bank, and that included a place called Bank of America. They don’t take conservative business.
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“And I don’t know if the regulators mandated that because of Biden or what,” he continued. “But you and Jamie [Dimon] and everybody, I hope you’re going to open your banks to conservatives because what you’re doing is wrong.”
Moynihan chose not to address the president’s accusation in the moment, instead opting for a deflection on Bank of America’s plans to sponsor the upcoming World Cup.
But Bank of America said later, political ideology has no bearing on its customer decisions.
“We serve more than 70 million clients and we welcome conservatives,” the bank said in an email to Straight Arrow News. “We are required to follow extensive government rules and regulations that sometimes result in decisions to exit client relationships. We never close accounts for political reasons and don’t have a political litmus test.”
Conservative debanking claim goes viral
The allegations of big bank bias against conservatives gained widespread attention after billionaire engineer and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen talked about it on the “Joe Rogan Experience.”
“There’s a constitutional amendment that says the government can’t restrict your speech, but there’s no kind of constitutional amendment that says the government can’t debank you, right,” Andreessen told Rogan in November 2024. “And so if they can’t do the one thing, they do the other thing, and then they don’t have to debank you. [Government officials] just have to put pressure on the private company banks to do it. And then the private company banks do it because they’re expected to, but the government gets to say, we didn’t do it. It was the private company that did it. And of course, JP Morgan can decide who they want to have as customers.”
“And so a lot of this started about 15 years ago with this thing called Operation Choke Point, where they decided, as marijuana started to become legal, as prostitution started to become legal, and then guns, which there’s always a fight about under the Obama administration, they started to debank legal marijuana businesses, escort businesses, and then gun shops, just like your gun manufacturers,” Andreessen added.
Andreessen’s comments caught the attention of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.
“I called Mark Andreessen after that,” Dimon said on Chase’s “The Unshakeables” podcast on Tuesday, Jan. 21. “He’s a friend of mine. I want to explain to him, we have not debanked anyone because of political or religious relationships, period.”
“Now, when we de-bank someone, they often blame that reason, but that’s not a reason,” he added. “We don’t bank marijuana companies because there’s no federal law around it. We simply can’t follow the law. If there’s a federal law, we probably would, and we do bank some crypto companies, and very carefully. We are responsible in the law to fight sex trafficking, money laundering, tax avoidance. It’s the Bank Secrecy Act, and we have to follow that.”
Debanking accusations before Andreessen’s remark
Republicans have accused big banks of debanking gun makers and fossil fuel companies. And there has been a legislative response.
A number of Republican-led states like Florida, Arizona and Georgia have passed laws that, in some capacity, stop banks from denying services over risks related to ESG, which stands for environmental, social and governance.
Back in 2018, Bank of America instituted a rule to stop lending money to gun manufacturers that make “military-style weapons.” In December 2023, that rule was clarified to say these clients and transactions “must go through an enhanced due diligence process and be escalated to the senior-most risk review body.”
Citigroup also instituted a policy in 2018 that required its business customers to stop selling firearms to people who hadn’t passed background checks or are younger than 21. They also stopped clients from selling bump stocks and high-capacity magazines.
On the environmental front, activist groups for years have called for banks to stop investing in the fossil fuel industry. But dozens of the world’s largest banks are still circulating loans totaling more than $700 billion for the industry as recently as 2023.
Meanwhile, on Jan. 8, the nation’s six largest banks left the United Nations-sponsored Net Zero Banking Alliance.
