Tag: banks

REVEALED: Bank of America Not Only Targets and Debanks Conservatives But Also Has Deep Ties and Exposure with the Chinese Communist Party

The Gateway Pundit has uncovered alarming evidence of Bank of America’s extensive ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Through its investments, board member connections, and collaborations with CCP-linked organizations, one of America’s largest banks appears to have placed profits above national security, raising serious questions about foreign influence.

Bank of America’s entanglement with the CCP dates back to 2005, when it invested $3 billion in China Construction Bank (CCB), the second-largest bank in China at the time.

This unprecedented investment, which marked the largest-ever foreign financial deal in China, signaled a willingness to align with CCP interests to gain access to the lucrative Chinese market.

While Bank of America sold its stake in 2013, it remains one of only eight U.S. banks permitted to locally incorporate in China, a privilege granted only with CCP approval.

The connections extend to Bank of America’s leadership. Maria Zuber and Lionel L. Nowell III, two board members, also serve on the board of Textron, an aviation company with deep operations in China.

Textron partnered with AVIC, a Chinese state-owned defense conglomerate sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for aiding the People’s Liberation Army.

Reports suggest that Textron’s aircraft designs were copied by Chinese companies, further underscoring the risks of such partnerships.

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EPA head Lee Zeldin reveals no real oversight of shocking $20B that Biden admin funneled through Citibank: ‘Tip of the iceberg’

A $20 billion Biden administration green-energy slush fund was collecting interest at a private bank and is being distributed without proper oversight, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin reveals in an exclusive interview.

President Joe Biden’s EPA parked $20 billion at the financial institution, which The Post has learned is Citibank, as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. But the awardees weren’t announced until August 2024 and Citibank was not brought in until September — after Biden’s disastrous June debate performance led him to withdraw from his re-election effort in July, making for a very different race with Vice President Kamala Harris the Democratic nominee.

Zeldin’s team is looking into whether former EPA employees are working at any of the grantees, which include the Opportunity Finance Network (receiving $2.29 billion), where vice president Laura Silverman says she brings “economic, financial, and social justice to communities,” and the Native CDFI Network ($400 million), which has featured Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as a speaker. Power Forward Communities, a $2 billion recipient, has no list of employees on its website — but does have openings for government affairs VP, communications VP and special assistant.

The others: Climate United Fund (which got the biggest grant, nearly $7 billion), Coalition for Green Capital ($5 billion), Inclusiv ($1.87 billion), Justice Climate Fund ($940 million) and Appalachian Community Capital ($500 million).

Here Lee Zeldin tells The Post’s Kelly Jane Torrance why it was “a high priority for me and my great team to get to the bottom of these questions as quickly as possible.”

This was on our radar during the transition, when the video was posted online at the beginning of December of the Biden EPA political appointee admitting on camera they were “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.”

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Senators and Witnesses Expose Biden Admin’s Debanking Scandal as New Operation Choke Point Evidence Emerges

During a US Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee hearing titled “Investigating the Real Impacts of Debanking in America,” senators and witnesses laid out how Joe Biden’s administration, regulators, overbearing rules, big banks, and more had resulted in millions of Americans being blacklisted from the banking industry.

Throughout the hearing, witnesses and senators noted that Biden regime pressure was a major contributor to this debanking wave, particularly through Operation Choke Point 2.0, a Biden-era push that primarily focused on pressuring banks to refuse to service cryptocurrency companies.

These claims were bolstered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC’s) release of 175 pages of documents before the hearing, which, according to FDIC Acting Chairman Travis Hill, show that banks that sought to offer crypto-related products or services were “almost universally met with resistance” from the FDIC, with some of this resistance coming in the form of “directives from supervisors to pause, suspend, or refrain from expanding all crypto- or blockchain-related activity.”

“Under the Biden administration, we’ve seen the rise of what many are calling Operation Choke Point 2.0, where federal regulators exploited their power, pressuring banks to cut off services to individuals and businesses with conservative dispositions, or folks aligned with industries they just didn’t like, like the color of one’s skin in my family’s history,” Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-SC) said. “I wholeheartedly believe that debanking someone over their political ideology is un-American and goes against the core values that our nation was founded upon.”

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The Hidden Dangers Of AI In Finance

Jim Rickards recently published a compelling article on AI risk for Insider Intel subscribers.

In it, Jim discusses a different way in which AI could crash markets. One that is totally separate from the DeepSeek, China, and NVIDIA angle we’ve been covering for the past week.

Today we’re going to review his key points and explore them in detail.

Here’s Jim:

“The ultimate danger arises when a large cohort of asset managers controlling trillions of dollars of assets all employ the same or similar AI algorithms in a risk management role. An individual robot working for a particular asset manager tells the manager to sell stocks in a crashing market. In some cases, the robot may be authorized to initiate a sale without further human intervention.

Taken separately, that may be the best course of action for a single manager. In the aggregate, a selling cascade with no offsetting buy orders from active managers, specialists or speculators takes stock prices straight down. Amplification through feedback loops makes matters worse.

Individual AI systems have various trigger points for selling. Not all will be triggered at once, yet all will be triggered eventually as selling begets more selling, which triggers more automated systems that add to the selling pressure, and so on. There are no contrarians among the robots. Building sentiment into systems is still at a primitive stage.”

This is a good example of why I read Jim’s work. He always approaches issues from a unique and thoughtful angle.

This risk is clearly real. We are now at the point where trading firms are integrating LLMs (AI models) into their proprietary algorithms.

What happens if a majority of trading firms are using the same AI software to drive their trading? For example, it’s likely that many money managers have integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT models into their algos.

Now that DeepSeek R1 is the new shiny object, maybe a significant portion of firms are switching to that model.

Perhaps DeepSeek approaches trading in a completely different way. What happens if ChatGPT interprets data bullishly, but DeepSeek sees the same information as bearish?

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UK Gov’t Wants Sweeping Powers to Spy on Your Bank Account

The UK’s Labour government announced plans this week that would further erode civil rights in the country, this time in the name of “preventing benefit fraud”.

The plans include revoking the driver’s licenses of those convicted of benefit fraud, “early morning raids” by “crack teams” from the DWP, and – most shockingly – permitting the government access to private banking information so they can take back money they believe they are owed, without the knowledge or permission of the accused.

In their own classically impartial fashion, the BBC reported this as:

Benefit cheats could be stripped of driving licenses

But this isn’t about “benefit cheats”. Even the government’s own figures say that benefit fraud makes up only ~3% of the welfare budget, and this move will only save £1.5 billion over the next five years.

£300 million per year is nothing in government terms. They just pledged 10x that amount, per year, to Ukraine.

They don’t care about the money, they care about power and precedent.

  • They want to be able to take away your driver’s license.
  • They want to be able to monitor your bank account.
  • They want to be able to take your money without your knowledge.
  • They want to be able to search your electronic devices and track your spending.

Maybe it will start with “reclaiming benefits”, but do you think it will end there?

Remember they also want to introduce Universal Basic Income, which would mean – technically – everyone is on “benefits”.

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Davos Post Mortem: The US Vibe Shift Goes Global

  • Investors and businesses have an optimistic outlook for the US while pessimism hangs over Europe’s lagging productivity, innovation and competitiveness.
  • US banks are capitalizing on strong profits and regulatory adjustments, with billions being freed up for lending, mergers and acquisitions or buybacks.
  • Amid more tariffs, policymakers are rethinking how to frame their portfolios and placing much of tech, rare earths and the energy transition under this umbrella.

Rarely have I found the Davos attendees so split in their investment outlooks.

American investors and business leaders were giddy over a possible “Golden Age,” though most were bracing for what promised to be a rollercoaster ride. Meanwhile, Europeans were moping about their economies, red tape and lack of innovation. And the Chinese delegation was the smallest in years.

Conversations revolved around the big challenges investors and corporates are trying to solve right now, from pivots in US policy to the languishing state of Europe and China, artificial intelligence market concentration, the risks of tariffs, what pessimism or optimism had already been priced in or where private markets might head next.

Sitting across 40 private meetings and panels, I better understood the mindset of businesses, investors and policymakers. Here are three of my takeaways.

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Comer Says He Has Evidence Banks are ‘Debanking’ Conservatives After Trump Calls out BofA CEO, Chase

Republican Rep James Comer was on “Sunday Morning Futures” with Maria Bartiromo and discussed President Trump calling out banks for discriminating against conservative clients.

“Are you investigating whether or not US Banks are debanking conservatives?” Bartiromo asked.

“Yes, we are. We’ve heard numerous instances of conservatives being debanked and what we want to know is this a process of the bank’s ESG policy, or is this our government stepping in like what we found with Twitter and Facebook, where the government stepped in and said they wanted certain conservatives deplatformed and censored,” Comer said.

“We want to know again, is this is the government involvement another dirty trick by the Joe Biden administration, or is this just bad liberal policy that discriminates against conservatives by the bank,” Comer continued.

“So, you have evidence of some banks debanking conservatives?” Bartiromo asked.

“Yes, especially people that were involved in different energy type businesses and things like that, as well as very well spoken, outspoken conservative activists, so, there are numerous instances, enough to open an investigation,” Comer continued.

“What should these banks expect in the coming months from your office?” Bartiromo asked.

“Well, they are gonna be asked a lot of questions. And I will say this for the banks, during the Biden influence pedaling investigation, the banks were the one entity that did cooperate with us,” Comer said.

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PayPal Admits Freezing Account Over Covid Mandate Criticism

It seemed pretty obvious as it was happening – but now there appears to be proof that PayPal was punishing users for their Covid-era speech that didn’t align with official narratives.

One of the critics of pandemic mandates that got “debanked” is UsForThem founder Molly Kingsley, who has been told by PayPal that her account got frozen because it was used to receive donations, and that was found to be outside the payment giant’s “acceptable use” rules.

The parent campaign group and Kingsley were vocal critics of obligatory Covid vaccination of children, forcing them to wear face masks, as well as school closures.

And now PayPal has spelled it out. The Telegraph reported the account was terminated because of “content published by UsForThem relating to mandatory Covid-19 vaccinations and school closures.”

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UK Gov’t Wants Sweeping Powers to Spy on Your Bank Account

The UK’s Labour government announced plans this week that would further erode civil rights in the country, this time in the name of “preventing benefit fraud”.

The plans include revoking the driver’s licenses of those convicted of benefit fraud, “early morning raids” by “crack teams” from the DWP, and –  most shockingly – permitting the government access to private banking information so they can take back money they believe they are owed, without the knowledge or permission of the accused.

In their own classically impartial fashion, the BBC reported this as:

Benefit cheats could be stripped of driving licenses

But this isn’t about “benefit cheats”. Even the government’s own figures say that benefit fraud makes up only ~3% of the welfare budget, and this move will only save £1.5 billion over the next five years.

£300 million per year is nothing in government terms. They just pledged 10x that amount, per year, to Ukraine.

They don’t care about the money, they care about power and precedent.

  • They want to be able to take away your driver’s license.
  • They want to be able to monitor your bank account.
  • They want to be able to take your money without your knowledge.
  • They want to be able to search your electronic devices and track your spending.

Maybe it will start with “reclaiming benefits”, but do you think it will end there?

Remember they also want to introduce Universal Basic Income, which would mean – technically – everyone is on “benefits”.

This is clearly a pathway to a “Social Credit” system.

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U.S. Federal Reserve withdraws from global climate coalition

The United States Federal Reserve has withdrawn from the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), a global coalition of central banks engaged in the study of climate risk that was launched in 2017.

“While the Board has appreciated the engagement with the NGFS and its members, the work of the NGFS has increasingly broadened in scope, covering a wider range of issues that are outside of the Board’s statutory mandate,” the central bank said in a statement on Friday.

The Fed has come under pressure in recent years from Republican lawmakers, including over concerns that climate concerns have unduly influenced financial regulation and that the central bank has become increasingly politicized.

In September, two House Republicans asked the Government Accountability Office to evaluate U.S. bank regulators’ membership in the NGFS.

Graham Steele, a former Biden-era Treasury official, said the Fed’s decision is “clearly a political move.”

“It defies what we know about the science and economic science risks of climate change,” Steele said in a statement. “There is no way to read this as anything other than responding to short-term political considerations.”

The central bank joined the global coalition in 2020.

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