Posts Tagged banking

NJ Now Going After Banks That Do Business With Gun Industry

From The New York Times:

New Jersey intends to stop doing business with gun manufacturers and retailers that fail to adopt policies, like conducting background checks, to stop guns from falling into the wrong hands, becoming the first state to take such stringent action against the firearms industry.
The state will also apply pressure on major financial institutions, seeking information from banks that do business with New Jersey about their relationships and policies involving gun makers and sellers.

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Lawmakers Continue To Go After Banks

From Forbes:

State legislatures, however, are finding ways to pressure banks.  Recently,  California Assemblywoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Los Angeles) introduced a resolution to urge  “banks that have open demand accounts with the state to evaluate their relationships with gun manufacturers and adopt lending practices that protect citizens before profits.”  The resolution states the California has “demand accounts with six banks that concurrently lend to gun manufacturers, which are Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Union Bank MUFG, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo & Co.”  According to Kamlager-Dove, “California has more gun laws than any other state in the union.”  Hence, instead of proposing new laws, Kamlager-Dove’s resolution “intends to affect the proliferation of guns by urging six nationally chartered banks to curtail their relationships with gun manufacturers. If major banks refuse to extend credit to gun manufacturers, borrowing costs for gun manufacturers would likely increase, which could reduce industry investment in additional capacity or new business lines.” Moreover, “such a result could reduce the proliferation of guns not only in California, but also across state lines.”

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Citigroup Continues To Discriminate Against Gun Industry

From The Federalist:

Citigroup’s getting asked some hard questions about the fiscal sanity of their decision to discriminate against firearms businesses, and their answers aren’t likely to soothe investors.
Justin Danhof, general counsel for the National Center Public Policy Research and Free Enterprise Project, posed a simple question in a shareholder meeting: “Can you tell us—your investors—exactly how much money we stand to lose because of this decision, and explain why you have this right while Warren Buffet has this wrong?”

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Dem Pressures Bank CEO To Do More On Guns

From Yahoo News:

However, Maloney’s tone shifted when she directed her questions to Dimon. The congresswoman referenced Dimon’s widely read annual letter released last week in which he wrote about JPMorgan having to sometimes turn down clients “with low character” as a way to be a “responsible” bank.
Maloney used excerpts of the letter to grill Dimon, saying that “actions speak louder than words on guns…[and] from what I can tell, these are just words to you.”

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Bill Introduced To Protect Gun Industry Access To Financial Services

From Guns.com:

The proposal, SB 821, was crafted to keep large financial institutions from denying service to constitutionally-protected industries involved in lawful shooting sports. Introduced by North Dakota Republican U.S. Sen. Kevin Cramer last week, U.S. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La, has signed on as a co-sponsor.

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NYT Wants Credit Cards To Discriminate Against Gun Owners

From Breitbart:

The Times suggests banks are “unwittingly financing mass shootings” by allowing individuals to use their cards to buy firearms and related accessories.

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Crypto Currency For Guns

From Bearing Arms:

Rob McNealy, OCC’s Cofounder, said: “As gun owners, and ardent defenders of the right to self-defense, we know that the gun industry is constantly under attack. We wanted to create a gun-centric crypto to act as a “continuity of business” payment system for gun retailers. Due to their decentralized nature, blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies simply can’t be shut down by “activist” banks.”

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Wells Fargo Continues Business With Gun Industry

From Bloomberg:

The San Francisco-based bank last week issued a $40 million line of credit to gun manufacturer Sturm, Ruger & Co., according to financial filings. That’s on top of the $431 million in debt that Wells Fargo has arranged for gunmakers since December 2012, when the Sandy Hook school shooting escalated the gun control debate. No other bank lent more to the industry over that time, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

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Bank Cancels Gun Accounts

From The Truth About Guns:

Representatives from Fifth Third Bank visited Spike’s Tactical, a Florida-based firearm manufacturer, last Tuesday to inform them that the bank was discreetly planning to exit the banking sector for gun-related businesses.

According to Spike’s Tactical co-owner Angela Register, the bank representative informed her and their chief financial officer that their business line of credit would not be renewed and encouraged them to find a new bank to hold their accounts, even mentioning that their commercial mortgage should be transferred or it could potentially be called early.

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ACLU Defends NRA In New York Case

From ACLU:

In the ACLU’s view, targeting a nonprofit advocacy group and seeking to deny it financial services because it promotes a lawful activity (the use of guns) violates the First Amendment. Because we believe the governor’s actions, as alleged, threaten the First Amendment rights of all advocacy organizations, the ACLU on Friday filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the NRA’s right to have its day in court.

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Corporate Gun Control

From National Review:

Titans of American banking and communication are taking steps to restrict the use of their funds or platforms by gun makers, gun-rights advocates, and others. The threat is just now emerging, but it may be as great a danger to gun rights as it is to the culture of free speech in this nation, and indeed the two are linked.

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Intuit Continues Assault On Gun Companies

From The Truth About Guns:

Yesterday, I spent time on the phone with Rob Hansel of Lone Wolf Distributors and John Heikkinen of Flint River Armory. The two companies sometimes do business together and recently had a rather large transaction go awry as a result of Intuit QuickBooks’ apparent anti-gun policy. The conversations were both interesting and enlightening, the latter because these issues highlight ongoing business practices with dishonest undertones on the part of Intuit.

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Operation Choke Point Under Scrutiny

From Electronic Frontier Foundation:

EFF recently received dozens of pages of documents in response to a FOIA request we submitted about Operation Choke Point, a Department of Justice project to pressure banks and financial institutions into cutting off service to certain businesses. Unfortunately, the response from the Department of Justice leaves many questions unanswered.

EFF has been tracking instances of financial censorship for years to identify how online speech is indirectly silenced or intimidated by shuttering bank accounts, donation platforms, and other financial institutions.  The Wall Street Journal wrote about the Justice Department’s controversial and secretive campaign against financial institutions in 2013, and one Justice Department official quoted in the article stated:

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FDIC Backtracking on Targeting of “Risky” Gun Businesses

From The Daily Signal:

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has acknowledged its role in Operation Choke Point and is taking dramatic steps to reverse its policies in targeting legal and legitimate industries that are disfavored by the Obama administration.

From The Washington Times:

In an effort to put an end to Operation Choke Point — a financial task force that was created by the Obama administration to “choke out” businesses it finds objectionable like gun shops — the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. issued a letter Wednesday saying all banks should examine their customer relationships on a case-by-case basis and not by industry operational risk.

“The FDIC is issuing this statement to encourage institutions to take a risk-based approach in assessing individual customer relationships rather than declining to provide banking services to entire categories of customers,” the FDIC said in a letter to its financial institutions released Wednesday.

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Regulations Proposed to Control Bitcoin

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

The State of New York has proposed BitLicense, a sprawling regulatory framework that would mandate licenses for a wide range of companies that interact with digital currencies. The proposal creates expensive and vague new obligations for startups and infringes on the privacy rights of both Bitcoin businesses and casual users. And we have only four days before public comments on the proposal close. Speak out now.

This isn’t just about Bitcoin. Any future digital currency protocol would be affected, even if it’s not being used for financial services. As the proposal is currently drafted, innovators who want to use these protocols for smart contracts, to track digital assets, or for any other purpose would still be affected.

 

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