Jamie Dimon and the crypto world agree ‘debanking’ needs to be fixed — but for different reasons
JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon agrees that “debanking” happens. He disagrees with some critics about the reasons why.
The claim that big banks have closed accounts held by certain political or business customers gained new visibility this week when President Donald Trump confronted Bank of America (BAC) CEO Brian Moynihan at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“I hope you start opening your bank to conservatives,” Trump told Moynihan during a virtual question and answer session. The president also appeared to include Dimon in his confrontation.
“I don’t know if the regulators mandated that because of Biden or what, but you and Jamie and everybody else, I hope you open your banks to conservatives because what you’re doing is wrong,” Trump added.
Moynihan did not respond to Trump’s criticism in the moment, but Dimon offered his defense of debanking in a Chase podcast interview published earlier this past week.
The reason isn’t politics, he said. It has to do with regulations imposed on banks by regulators in Washington, D.C.
“We have not debanked anyone because of political or religious relationships, period,” he said.
What Dimon instead argued is that US rules such as the Bank Secrecy Act discourage banks from dealing with customers that are considered high-risk — and that there needs to be clearer regulation on that front.
“We are responsible in the law to fight sex trafficking, money laundering, tax avoidance,” Dimon said, and regulators “put a lot of pressure on us” and “tell us what is high risk.”
“If we don’t debank someone and something goes wrong, it could be hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. So a lot of banks are kind of guessing, like, ‘we should get rid of these people’?”
“We’re not allowed to tell you why we debanked you,” he added.
The issue of debanking surfaced repeatedly during the 2024 presidential campaign and had perhaps its most prominent airing in the weeks after Trump’s election win in early November when Silicon Valley billionaire and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
During that interview, Andreessen claimed the Biden administration had instructed regulators to pressure banks into debanking its enemies — including closing accounts held by conservatives and startups in crypto, artificial intelligence, and other sectors.
He referred to it as “Operation Choke Point 2.0.” (Operation Choke Point was a program during the Obama administration designed to root out bank accounts tied to consumer fraud — a program that also attracted conservative critics).