The Treasury Department released a report saying the biggest banks in America let politics decide who gets accounts. Not credit scores. Not income verification. Not whether you bounced twelve checks in Reno. Politics.
This confirms what Trump has been saying for years. Banks discriminated against conservatives. They looked at your voter registration before they looked at your balance sheet. Someone at JPMorgan saw you donated to the wrong candidate and decided you don't get to deposit money anymore. That's the business model now. Chase Manhattan meets the Stasi.
The report doesn't name which banks or which customers got blacklisted. Just says it happened. Real helpful. Like telling someone their house is on fire but not which room. The Treasury couldn't be bothered to specify whether this was three banks or all of them. Whether it was ten customers or ten thousand. Just that feelings influenced underwriting.
Here's what this means for your portfolio: absolutely nothing. Banks have been making arbitrary decisions based on vibes since the Medicis. The only difference is now they're doing it with ESG committees instead of guys named Sal. Your calls expire worthless either way.
Retail traders saw this headline and immediately started dumping bank stocks. Too political. Too risky. Better put everything into that memecoin their cousin's roommate mentioned. Because nothing says sound financial planning like panic-selling JPM to buy a token named after a dog with a speech impediment.
The real story is that banks spent decades pretending they only cared about money, and it turns out they care about everything except money. They'll deny you an account for your Instagram likes but they'll finance a cargo ship full of asbestos headed for a preschool if the paperwork clears.
Trump gets to say he was right. The banks get to issue statements about commitment to serving all customers. Treasury gets to pretend this report changes anything. And you get to watch your SPY calls bleed out while arguing about banking discrimination in a Reddit thread at 2 a.m.
Photo by Connor Gan on Unsplash
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