Tag: banks

Western Banks Warn Against EU Plans To Give Russian Funds To Ukraine

Some Western banks are lobbying against an EU plan to use profits made by Russian central bank funds that are frozen in Europe to arm Ukraine, Reuters reported.

The European Commission has proposed sending up to 3 billion euros to Ukraine per year using the revenue. About 90% would go to a fund called the “European Peace Facility” that can be used to buy weapons for Ukraine, and the remaining funds would go to the EU’s central budget for other types of aid.

Russia has slammed the plan and has vowed to respond. “This is outright banditry and theft. These actions are a gross and unprecedented violation of basic international norms. We said that we would respond, and so we shall,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday.

Sources told Reuters that banks fear they could be held liable by Russia in the future for being involved in the transaction. The report said once sanctions on Russia are eased or lifted, they could face decades of legal action.

The banks also worry the move would erode trust in the Western banking system. One source said it would set a bad precedent and that stealing the funds would amount to the “weaponization of foreign-held reserves and assets.”

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Federal Reserve Declares CBDC a “Key Duty” to Congress, Despite Public Statements Attempting To Downplay Its Focus

The Fed (US Federal Reserve, the central bank) does not appear to be one of those institutions whose word you could, so to speak – take to the bank.

Just as it is reassuring the public that it is not focusing on introducing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in the country, the Fed has only recently been telling Congress that steps leading to a digital dollar are among its “7 key duties.”

This is according to Congressman Tom Emmer, who posted a document on X on March 14, explaining that his office received it as the Fed representatives were in Congress for a presentation.

What caused the alarm is the mention of Automated Clearinghouse and FedNow among the “key duties,” as these payment systems are seen as a way to move towards a CBDC.

It’s been two years since the US Central Bank first came out with a paper looking into this possibility, and is also linked with the Digital Dollar Project, so this should not be seen as controversial per se.

However, just one week before the presentation document Congressman Emmer was referring to when he posted, “If you don’t think the Fed is pursuing a CBDC, think again” – the Fed was in the Senate, where Chairman Jerome Powell told the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee that adopting or even recommending a US CBDC was a something that was “nowhere near (…) in any form.”

“People don’t need to worry about it,” Powell also said.

But people do, and that was true even before this latest development commented on by Emmer. The ability of the state to impose financial surveillance over the population – in the vein of what is already happening in China in earnest – is the main reason for this.

The most vocal opponents in Congress are Republicans, while former President Donald Trump, who is likely to run for office again later this year, has vowed to stop a US CBDC, describing it as “a dangerous threat to freedom.”

However, the Fed – despite its chair appearing to be convincing America that this “danger” is in no way imminent, has had highly positioned officials like Vice Chairman Lael Brainard push for it.

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JPMorgan To Roll Out Controversial Biometric Payments

America’s largest bank and one of the largest in the world, J.P. Morgan, is preparing to launch biometric payments next year and is currently carrying out pilot projects.

J.P. Morgan has chosen PopID – which verifies a person’s identity via facial recognition, among other methods – as the backbone for the project.

The massive financial corporation is clearly unwilling to be left behind the likes of Mastercard or Visa, who are both implementing biometrics-powered payments.

According to the bank, one of the first events where this was trialed was the Formula 1 race in Miami, and that was also the first time this happened at a Formula 1 venue.

The ultimate goal is to expand authentication based on individuals’ fingerprints, palms, and faces to anyone interested, but with a focus on stores, restaurants, and various event venues.

J.P. Morgan says this will be a faster and safer, as well as “personalized” way for customers to pay, while those with things to sell are promised higher turnover and improved customer loyalty, but also a centralized place to access transactions and marketing data, say reports.

And what’s in it for the bank, other than potentially amassing large amounts of biometric data? Merchants will have the opportunity to buy J.P. Morgan Payments tablets, though this will not be obligatory, but support and transaction processing fees will be.

In a statement, the bank revealed that it is betting on biometric payments as the industry is forecast to grow to 3 billion users and $5.8 trillion worth of transactions over the next two years. And the giant expects digital commerce to eventually cover online, mobile, and in-store checkout.

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Report: Federal Government Asked Big Banks to Surveil Purchases of VPNs and Gift Cards, Transfers to Crowdsourcing Sites

In January, the House Judiciary Committee sounded the alarm about the federal government asking banks to surveil transactions related to certain keywords, such as “MAGA” and “Trump,” as part of investigations into January 6, 2021 at the Capitol. But new documents obtained by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have revealed that the surveillance that was initially identified by the House Judiciary Committee in January was much broader than these early reports suggested.

The House Judiciary Committee’s initial letter about this financial surveillance revealed that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) sent several financial institutions lists of terms that it deemed to be indicators of potential violent extremism and suggested that banks use these search terms to flag suspect transactions. These lists included terms such as MAGA and Trump and also recommended searching for more generic terms, such as terms related to purchases of transportation and terms related to purchases of books (including religious texts) and other media that FinCEN deemed to be “extremist.”

These new documents, which were shared in a report titled “Financial Surveillance in the United States: How Federal Law Enforcement Commandeered Financial Institutions to Spy on Americans,” show that the list of terms FinCEN asked banks and financial institutions to flag was much wider.

In one document, FinCEN brands lawful activities, such as “frequent ATM withdrawals and wire transfers with no apparent economic or business purpose” and “purchases that appear excessive or unusual for hobbyist or other legitimate use,” as potential indicators of violent extremism.

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Another Senator Signs Onto Marijuana Banking Bill, Saying It Will ‘Take The Target Off The Backs’ Of Dispensaries Facing Robberies

A Democratic senator has announced that she’s joined the list of bipartisan cosponsors of a marijuana banking bill, stressing the need for the reform amid a spate of robberies targeting state-licensed cannabis businesses in her state.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) signed on as a cosponsor of the Secure and Fair Enforcement Regulation (SAFER) Banking Act on Tuesday, becoming the 35th member of the chamber to add their name to the legislation in addition to its lead sponsor.

“Last year there were more than 50 robbery attempts at marijuana dispensaries in the State of Washington,” the senator said.

A report from StoptheDrugWar.org further found that nearly 100 Washington cannabis shops were impacted over a period of less than five months in 2021.

“This bill will take the target off the backs of our state’s dispensaries by updating federal banking laws so they don’t have to do all their business in cash,” Cantwell said.

The senator has also previously pushed for marijuana industry access to federal Small Business Administration (SBA) loans and services, as well as the elimination of an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) code known as 280E that prevents cannabis businesses from taking standard federal tax deductions.

Congressional researchers also recently Congressional acknowledged in a report that the lack of banking access for state-legal marijuana businesses leads them to be “heavily reliant on cash transactions, making them a target for theft.”

The Senate Banking Committee passed the SAFER Banking Act to address the issue last September, but the measure is pending action on the floor. Earlier versions have cleared the House in some form at least seven times in recent sessions.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in late December that lawmakers will “hit the ground running” in 2024, aiming to build on bipartisan progress on several key issues, including marijuana banking reform—though he noted it “won’t be easy.”

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Lord Jacob Rothschild dead at 87 – Financier who was major figure in banking dynasty passes away

LORD Jacob Rothschild has died at the age of 87, his family have announced.

The financier was a British peer and a member of the Rothschild banking family.

His family have been at the top of the financial tree since the 18th century.

Lord Rothschild’s family have an estimated fortune of around £825million, according to last year’s Sunday Times Rich List, and give away a reported £66 million to Jewish causes, education and art.

In a statement, the family said: “Our father Jacob was a towering presence in many peoples’ lives – a superbly accomplished financier, a champion of the arts and culture, a devoted public servant, a passionate supporter of charitable causes in Israel and and Jewish culture, a keen environmentalist and much-loved friend, father and grandfather.

“He will be buried in accordance with Jewish custom in a small family ceremony and there will be a memorial at a later date to celebrate his life.”

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And the Winner Is…Not You

Of all the government or quasi-government institutions, there is perhaps none as openly opaque in its operations and unaccountable for its failures as the Federal Reserve. For, unlike its top rivals for this most dubious of distinctions, like the CIA, NSA, or DOD, which do their law bending and money wasting largely of sight and out of mind, the nation’s money supply is so ubiquitous, so ever-present in the lives of the ordinary person that its activities must of necessity take place before the public eye. Hence, the gradual development of Fed Speak; that is, the art of speaking so technocratically that none but the most arcanely initiated have any hope of understanding what is being said or done.

Consider a few commonplace examples, which one can find in the regularly published minutes of the Federal Reserve’s meetings:

The Fed will “conduct overnight reverse repurchase agreement operations at an offering rate of 0.8 percent and with a per-counterparty limit of $160 billion per day,” and further “engage in dollar roll and coupon swap transactions as necessary to facilitate settlement of the Federal Reserve’s agency MBS transactions.”

Mm-hm. Yes. Indeed—perfectly clear.

Translated: the Fed intends to “buy and then sell back at a set date and price any qualifying security from any qualifying corporation or institution,” essentially, a futures contract meant to help operations that are either illiquid or overleveraged stay in business; and, further towards that end, the Fed intends to “continue to sell short various portions of its now nearly $3 trillion in mortgage backed security holdings,” again in an effort to help illiquid or highly levered dealers and traders of these securities stay liquid.

That Fed Speak elides more than it illuminates is, of course, intentional and operates on a number of levels: first, no ordinary person understands any of this; second, those who do understand benefit from these arrangements, i.e. the major banks, and consequently love it and have lobbied for it; and, lastly, the above combination along with their desire to pass the buck to anyone else means your congressional reps have no interest in intervening with the Fed’s activities, even when it blatantly violates the rules Congress put in place when it set the Federal Reserve up—all Fed purchases having been statutorily mandated to occur in the “open market,” that is at market prices (i.e. not executed as futures contracts).

Lev Menand’s latest book, which I reviewed last year, for all its sympathy for the Federal Reserve’s activities (having been himself an employee), could not avoid deeming the Fed completely out of control, acting since 2008 and through COVID without any bounds at all: an exploding balance sheet, unlimited credit facilities for troubled banks—this is not “Free Market Capitalism,” but rank corporatism, and a major reason young people increasingly view socialism or populist conservatism as preferable alternatives.

For, much like the national security establishment, it isn’t as though these gross violations of the principles of liberal, capitalist government have even produced any notable successes: quite to the contrary, they have produced little but abject failure.

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American Express, Visa, Mastercard move ahead with code to track gun store purchases in California

Major credit card companies are moving to make a merchant code available for firearm and ammunition retailers in order to comply with a new California law that will allow banks to potentially track suspicious gun purchases and report them to law enforcement, CBS News has learned.

Retailers are assigned merchant codes based on the types of goods they sell, and the codes allow banks and credit card companies to detect purchase patterns. Currently gun shops are lumped in with other types of retailers, such as sporting goods stores. 

Mastercard, Visa and American Express initially agreed to implement a standalone code for firearm sellers, but later paused their work on it after receiving blowback from Second Amendment advocates concerned tracking gun purchases would infringe on the rights of legal gun owners.

Gun control activists hope the code, approved by an international organization in 2022, can be used as a tool to help identify suspect purchases and, consequently, stop gun crime, including mass shootings. Proponents say a code for firearms merchants would allow banks and credit unions to alert law enforcement of potentially suspicious purchasing patterns in the same way they already flag other types of transactions, such as those that suggest identity theft or terrorist financing. 

While a merchant code for standalone firearm and ammunition sellers would yield data that shows a transaction was made at a gun store, the credit card companies say the code would not provide details about the customer or insight into individual items that were purchased.

At least seven Republican-controlled state legislatures have banned the code while nine other legislatures are considering similar legislation. However, deep blue California passed a law requiring retailers that primarily sell firearms to adopt it by May 2025.  

Last month, executives from Mastercard, Visa and American Express each wrote to congressional Democrats assuring them the code would be available to retailers in California by that deadline, according to documents obtained by CBS News. 

“The applicable standalone merchants in California primarily engaged in the sale of firearms will be required to utilize the code,” wrote Mastercard executive Tucker Foote.

The letters from credit card executives reflect the tricky political waters the companies find themselves in. 

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Treasury Department’s Janet Yellen Dodges Questions on Financial Surveillance of “MAGA,” “Trump”

A wave of backlash for the Biden administration has been triggered following a probe into a surveillance mission by the Treasury Department targeting Americans. Republicans have been seeking answers about the initiative, which involved surveilling bank records of Americans for “extremist” activities post-January 6.

Recent reports revealed a controversial directive from the Treasury Department regarding the monitoring of financial transactions. Under this directive, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) asked financial institutions to investigate their clients’ transaction data for terms such as “MAGA” and “Trump.” This sparked an outcry from Republicans who questioned the government’s monitoring strategies.

This comes following a revelation of the specific sectors and demographic being targeted — Trump supporters, patrons of outdoor stores like Cabela’s, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Bass Pro Shops, and individuals who bought religious texts. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen encountered numerous questions about these retrieval requests during her appearances on Capitol Hill this week.

However, these intense inquiries were deflected by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who responded that the matter was under investigation and that she didn’t have extensive knowledge about the situation.

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Appeals Court: FBI’s Safe-Deposit Box Seizures Violated Fourth Amendment

The FBI violated the Fourth Amendment when its agents rifled through the contents of more than 700 safe-deposit boxes in the aftermath of a March 2021 raid, a panel of federal appeals court judges ruled unanimously on Tuesday.

In doing so, the judges at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed what innocent victims of the raid and their attorneys have been arguing for years: that the FBI overstepped the bounds of its warrant issued in the case and failed to follow proper protocol when federal agents cracked open safe-deposit boxes, ran the contents past drug-sniffing dogs, and tried to seize some of the money and other valuables found in the boxes.

The 9th Circuit’s ruling pivots on a detail of the case that Reason first highlighted more than a year ago: the existence of so-called “supplemental instructions” for the handling of the safe-deposit boxes seized at U.S. Private Vaults in Beverly Hills.

The warrant authorizing the raid expressly forbade federal agents from engaging in a “criminal search or seizure of the contents of the safety [sic] deposit boxes.” Under typical FBI procedure, the boxes should have been taken into custody until they could be returned to their rightful owners. But those “supplemental instructions” drawn up by the special agent in charge of the operation told agents to be on the lookout for cash stored inside the safe-deposit boxes and to note “anything which suggests the cash may be criminal proceeds.”

It is “particularly troubling,” wrote Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. in Tuesday’s ruling, that the government was unable to provide any “limiting principle to how far a hypothetical ‘inventory search’ conducted pursuant to customized instructions can go.”

Elsewhere in the ruling, Smith theorized that if a government agency were “given the discretion to create customized inventory policies” for “each car it impounds and each person detained, the ensuing search stops looking like an ‘inventory’ meant to simply protect property and looks more like a criminal investigation of that particular car or person, i.e, more like a ‘ruse.'”

“If there remained any doubt whether the government conducted a ‘criminal search or seizure,’ that doubt is put to rest by the fact that the government has already used some of the information from inside the boxes to obtain additional warrants to further its investigations and begin new ones,” Smith wrote.

“The Ninth Circuit today held that the FBI violated the Fourth Amendment rights of hundreds of people by breaking into their safe deposit boxes to try to forfeit everything worth taking,” Robert Frommer, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal nonprofit that represented some of the plaintiffs in the case, tells Reason. He said the case should bring renewed attention to a congressional proposal to reform federal forfeiture laws in order to “stop federal cops from continuing to act like robbers.”

A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment on the ruling and referred the matter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which did not respond to Reason’s request for comment.

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