Tag: banks

Trump Housing Director Bill Pulte Launches Probe into Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac’s SHARIA LAW Home Financing

President Trump’s federal housing director Bill Pulte says officials are examining claims that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac participate in home-financing arrangements marketed as compliant with Islamic law.

Pulte, who serves as both FHFA Director and chairman of the boards of the two government-sponsored mortgage giants, responded directly on X after White House correspondent Natalie Winters highlighted the issue.

Winters posted evidence that Fannie Mae maintains a specific loan code for “Musharaka Islamic Finance Mortgages” and that Freddie Mac explicitly recognizes financing “designed to comply with Islamic law.”

Pulte replied: “We are looking into this right now. Thanks for mentioning!”

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which together back nearly half of all U.S. residential mortgages and remain under federal conservatorship, have for years provided critical secondary-market liquidity to Sharia-compliant products. These are structured primarily as diminishing Musharaka (co-ownership) arrangements rather than traditional interest-bearing loans, because Islamic law forbids riba (interest).

Providers such as Guidance Residential have financed more than $10 billion for tens of thousands of families using these structures, with the GSEs stepping in as co-owners or investors to keep the pipeline flowing. The practice dates back to the early 2000s, when Fannie and Freddie first began purchasing Islamic mortgage products.

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Reality Bites: Socialist NYC Mayor Mamdani Turns To Capitalist Bankers For Help

After socialist New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani went after Citadel’s Ken Griffin, created a property database of wealthy homeowners that makes the list easily accessible to “Luigi-worshipping leftist thugs,” and endlessly bashed America and capitalism, all while his friend, Democratic Socialists of America’s unofficial spokesperson Hasan Piker, called on his followers to “kill capitalists in the streets” and other DSA members called for the destruction of America from within, the far-left NYC mayor, who is running into roadblocks, has called on capitalist bankers for help.

Piker in his own words: “KiII those motherf**kers and murder those motherf**kers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their f**king red capitalist blood.” 

Bloomberg reports that Mamdani is seeking top capitalist bankers for a new business advisory council as he attempts to mend relations with Wall Street after spewing dangerous rhetoric against the very people who make the city go ’round.

Those invited include former UBS Americas Chief Executive Officer Robert Wolf, former Lazard investment-banking chief Antonio Weiss, and Bank of America’s New York City President Jose Tavarez, according to people familiar with the discussions.

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CBS News Not Airing ‘60 Minutes’ Jeffrey Epstein Story Under Scrutiny

Senator Ron Wyden has questioned why a 60 Minutes interview with now-former correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi on Jeffrey Epstein’s banking practices never aired, adding it had been “suppressed.”

The Oregon Democrat raised the issue in a new Senate Finance Committee report, published on August 4, alleging Deutsche Bank failed to promptly disclose more than $250 million in suspicious Epstein-related transactions.

“It is disappointing that, instead of advancing new facts that would help bring accountability to the men who participated in Epstein’s trafficking operation, the report largely recycles allegations that have already been exhaustively examined by courts and the government,” a spokesperson for JPMorgan Chase told Newsweek.

Asked for comment, Wyden’s office pointed Newsweek to page 61 of the report, where it says his taped interview with Alfonsi was intended for a broader 60 Minutes segment on banks and Epstein, adding that it is unclear whether CBS News leadership will allow the broader segment to air following Alfonsi’s departure from the network.

CBS News says the segment simply was not ready before the show’s season ended.

Pushing back against any suggestion that the interview was buried, a spokesperson for the network said in a statement shared with Newsweek via email: “We air pieces when they are ready, and suggesting that an interview is being ‘suppressed’ for any reason is categorically false.”

According to Wyden’s report, “the investigation found significant evidence that JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of America violated federal anti-money laundering laws by failing to screen and report Epstein’s suspicious financial transactions in a timely manner.”

A spokesperson for Bank of America told Newsweek: “We take our legal and regulatory obligations seriously and, as we have previously said, the bank did not facilitate wrongdoing.”

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Capital One Admits It Closed Over 300 Trump Organization Accounts After Internal AML Review — Bank Calls Political Debanking Claims ‘Misguided’

Capital One Financial disclosed in a late-Friday court filing that it closed more than 300 Trump Organization-affiliated bank accounts in 2021 — not because of politics, the bank insists, but following a “months-long” internal anti-money laundering review. The disclosure, reported by Reuters and confirmed by CNBC, marks the first time any financial institution has formally cited AML concerns in connection with the Trump family’s business empire.

The filing, submitted to federal court in Miami on August 1, 2026, is Capital One’s latest attempt to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the Trump Organization and Eric Trump in March 2025. The suit alleges that Capital One acted on “woke” political ideology and sought to capitalize on the anti-Trump sentiment that surged after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Capital One’s lawyers called those allegations “misguided” and insisted that “the closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance.”

The bank was careful to add a crucial qualifier: it “never accused the Trump Organization of illegal money laundering.” Instead, Capital One argues its compliance team identified “transaction patterns” that fit the types of activity flagged under federal Bank Secrecy Act guidance — a distinction that may satisfy regulators but does little to quiet the political firestorm the case has ignited.

Conservative critics have long argued that the post-January 6 wave of corporate debanking — in which major financial institutions quietly closed accounts tied to figures on the political right — amounts to ideological discrimination dressed up in regulatory language. Capital One is hardly alone in the dock. In January 2026, the Trump Organization filed a separate $5 billion suit against JPMorgan Chase on identical grounds. Trump signed an executive order in August 2025 specifically banning discriminatory debanking, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has launched a review of nine major banks over the practice.

The Miami federal court has now dismissed two prior versions of the Trump-Capital One complaint, each time allowing an amended filing. The latest amended complaint, submitted in July 2026, claims the bank’s AML rationale is a post-hoc cover story, pointing to “cherry-picked” internal documents that the bank says, when read in full context, vindicate its compliance process. U.S. District Judge Roy Altman will now decide whether the Trump team has finally built a case strong enough to survive.

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The CCP Is Inside the Fed: Shocking New Evidence of Chinese Infiltration at America’s Central Bank

Most Americans have heard about Chinese spies targeting our military or hacking private companies. But there’s another front in this quiet war, one that’s gone largely unreported—and it may be the most dangerous of all: China’s long game to infiltrate and manipulate the United States Federal Reserve.

A 2022 Senate investigation offered a rare glimpse into this operation, but even that barely scratches the surface. What’s playing out behind closed doors isn’t just a few bureaucratic missteps or naïve collaborations—it’s a full-blown economic espionage campaign.

This is warfare without bullets.

The Fed: A Prime Target for Chinese Espionage

The Federal Reserve is the engine of the U.S. economy. Its decisions move markets, shape global capital flows, and set the tone for the world’s monetary system. Infiltrating the Fed doesn’t just give China intelligence – it gives them influence.

Over at least a decade, the CCP has targeted Fed employees through a mix of coercion, recruitment offers, unauthorized data access, and propaganda partnerships, mostly hidden behind Chinese academic institutions and think tanks.

According to this damning Senate report, the Fed’s own counterintelligence team identified a group of 13 employees across eight regional banks—internally referred to as the “P-Network”—who exhibited serious red flags linked to the Chinese government.

This pattern could be replicated at scale.

Hard Evidence of Espionage and Infiltration

Here are some documented examples that received little attention from the mainstream media:

1. Detained and Surveilled in China (Individual A)

    •    In 2019, a Fed employee was detained four separate times by Chinese authorities during a visit to Shanghai. He was threatened, told his family would be harmed, and coerced into handing over sensitive U.S. economic data. Chinese agents accessed his Fed laptop, phones, and internal contact lists. He was ordered to “tell a good story about China” back in the U.S. This employee returned to his post with full access to confidential monetary policy data.

2. Secret Data Transfers to Chinese Institutions (Individual B)

    •    Another employee sent modeling code and restricted Fed data to a university linked to China’s central bank (PBOC). He proposed deeper collaboration between his Reserve Bank and Chinese state institutions while maintaining access to Class II FOMC data, which includes sensitive internal forecasts and deliberations.

3. Coordination with Chinese Propaganda Outlets (Individual C)

    •   Another Fed employee took a paid visiting professorship in China funded by the CCP and subsequently acted as a liaison with Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese government’s propaganda arm. He even helped Chinese journalists and officials gain access to Fed contacts, often bypassing formal Fed communication channels.

4. Suspicious Talent Recruitment Programs (Individual D)

    •    Another Fed employee attempted to transfer large U.S. data sets to Chinese institutions. He was found to have joined the Thousand Talents Program, China’s premier foreign recruitment tool for stealing scientific and economic research. This affiliation was never disclosed and the employee continued working at the Fed.

A Named Case: John Harold Rogers

The Justice Department indicted John Harold Rogers, a former senior adviser in the Federal Reserve’s Division of International Finance, for allegedly passing sensitive U.S. economic data to agents tied to the Chinese government  .

Rogers served at the Fed from 2010 to 2021, holding access to confidential materials related to FOMC deliberations, economic forecasts, and tariff policy analysis  .

He allegedly began working with Chinese co‑conspirators posing as university students starting around 2013, and intensified the misconduct after 2018, using personal email and printed documents to transfer restricted Fed data  .

In 2023, Rogers is accused of receiving approximately $450,000 from a Chinese university while teaching and meeting with these supposed “students” in China, including hotel rooms where he shared Fed trade secrets.

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NATO’s Shadow Bank: Financing a New Era of Militarisation

As the war in Ukraine continues to reshape European security, tensions surrounding Iran and the Middle East intensify, and NATO members accelerate defence spending, the alliance is entering a more openly militarised phase. Behind the familiar language of deterrence, resilience and collective security lies a deeper question: how will this expanding confrontation be financed, and who stands to benefit from it?

In this special broadcast, Kevork Almassian, host of Syriana Analysis, speaks with Mats Nilsson, senior analyst at Sweden’s Dissident Club, about the NATO summit in Ankara and the emerging financial architecture behind long-term rearmament. Their discussion examines the proposed Defense, Security and Resilience Bank, a mechanism presented as supporting allied preparedness but viewed by critics as a means of locking Western states into permanent military expenditure.

Almassian and Nilsson place Turkey’s growing regional weight, Israel’s strategic position, and the conflicts involving Russia and Iran within a wider geopolitical contest extending toward China and Eurasia. As conventional diplomacy gives way to enlarged military budgets, arms transfers and financial instruments designed to sustain them, the stakes reach far beyond any single battlefield.

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The World’s Biggest Shell Game

In 2001, Enron’s collapse revealed that a corporation could manufacture the appearance of financial health by creating thousands of shell companies, the purpose of which was to buy the real corporation’s toxic assets, keeping them hidden from investors and regulators. Enron created more than 3,000 such shell companies, officially dubbed “Special Purpose Vehicles” (SPV). When the shell game unraveled, $30 billion in hidden debt materialized overnight.

Lehman Brothers used this principle with “Repo 105,” temporarily moving $50 billion in assets off its balance sheet at quarter-end to SPVs, then retrieving them days later after reporting deadlines passed. Lehman’s bankruptcy examiner documented the fraud across 2,200 pages. No one went to prison.

Citigroup ran $80 billion through off-balance-sheet structured investment vehicles. When the commercial paper market froze in 2008, Citigroup had to re-absorb $58 billion, requiring a $45 billion government bailout. Bear Stearns created hedge fund SPVs housing toxic mortgage securities. When they imploded in 2007, they served as the canary in the coal mine for the entire financial system.

Bigger Than Corporations

The crucial question is: Does the same architecture operate at the level of nation-states? It does, through the mechanism of dollar reserve requirements and Treasury market structure.

Here is how it works. The United States issues Treasury bonds to finance deficit spending. Under the post-Bretton Woods dollar reserve system, central banks worldwide are expected (and in practice effectively required) to hold significant portions of their foreign exchange reserves in U.S. dollar-denominated assets, primarily Treasury securities. The Bank for International Settlements and International Monetary Fund frameworks for reserve adequacy create structural pressure on smaller countries to accumulate Treasuries as a demonstration of financial stability and as insurance against currency crises.

The result: Japan holds approximately $1.1 trillion in U.S. Treasuries. China holds approximately $760 billion. The United Kingdom, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, Belgium, and Ireland each hold hundreds of billions. Together, foreign countries hold approximately $8.5 trillion of the $36 trillion U.S. national debt.

The Carrot and the Stick

These countries are not freely choosing to hold American debt the way a private investor chooses a stock. Many are incentivized, and in some cases coerced, into doing so by the international monetary system.

Countries that attempt to de-dollarize their reserves face currency instability, reduced access to dollar swap lines, and in some cases direct U.S. diplomatic and financial pressure. Iraq announced it would price oil in euros in 2000. Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi proposed a gold-backed African currency to replace the dollar for oil transactions. Both countries experienced U.S. military intervention shortly thereafter. Correlation is not causation, but the pattern has not gone unnoticed by smaller nations.

Without foreign central-bank demand structurally supporting the Treasury market, the interest rates required to attract voluntary buyers would be considerably higher. Foreign reserve requirements effectively subsidize American borrowing costs, suppress Treasury yields, and support the dollar’s reserve status in a mutually reinforcing cycle that benefits the issuer enormously.

Enron’s SPVs kept toxic assets off the balance sheet, allowing rating agencies such as Moody’s and S&P to maintain investment-grade ratings until days before the collapse. The structural foreign demand for Treasuries similarly influences how sovereign debt markets evaluate American creditworthiness. When Moody’s downgraded the United States from Aaa to Aa1 in May 2025, it cited the $36 trillion debt and deficit trajectory. But that downgrade was decades late relative to what the raw numbers would suggest.

Loss Is Inevitable

The difference between Enron’s SPVs and the sovereign SPV system is that Enron collapsed suddenly. The dollar reserve system is unwinding slowly — through BRICS de-dollarization efforts, bilateral currency swap agreements between China and trading partners, Saudi Arabia’s acceptance of yuan for oil sales, and the gradual diversification of central bank reserves away from Treasuries toward gold, which global central banks purchased at record rates in 2022, 2023, and 2024.

When enough of the SPV network decides to stop absorbing the parent’s liabilities, the parent’s true balance sheet becomes visible. What happened to Enron in 2001, and to Lehman in 2008, will eventually happen to any entity that has confused the appearance of solvency with its substance.

The shell game always ends the same way.

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‘Not simply another community bank’: Critics sound alarm over new Indian bank in Texas

The State Bank of India has announced it is opening a new branch in Frisco, Texas, with critics raising concerns about Indian workers sending remittances back to India with minimal fees.

The branch is expected to open in mid-September and will be located off Coit Road.

The Indian population in the Dallas-Fort Worth area is estimated at about 230,000, with many being in the U.S. on H-1B visas. The population increased by 20% from 2020 to 2024 as the federal government continued approving H-1B visas.

The bank’s website states that customers can send remittances—money foreign workers send back to their home countries—with zero transfer fees.

Online customers can send up to $50,000 per day, while mobile customers can send up to $25,000 per day, according to the bank’s website. There is no stated limit for remittances sent from a branch. The bank specializes in remittance services to India and Bangladesh.

Employees at the bank speak multiple languages, including English, Hindi, Punjabi, and other Indian languages.

State Bank of India is headquartered in Los Angeles and has multiple branches across California. The institution is also backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures deposits of up to $250,000 per depositor.

The new Frisco location has drawn criticism from those who say the services could be used to evade American laws.

According to an article by Ammon Blair, a senior fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Secure & Sovereign Nation Initiative, the United States is losing at least $200 billion annually from remittances leaving the domestic economy and supporting foreign economies.

“Through the lens of gray-zone conflict, remittances are not neutral financial transfers. They function as an asymmetric economic weapon, weakening U.S. labor markets, eroding the rule of law, and stabilizing regimes that act contrary to American interests. In gray-zone conflict, the rule of law itself becomes contested terrain,” Blair wrote.

Blair also told the Daily Signal that the bank is bringing the remittance issue directly to Texas.

“This is not simply another community bank entering a growing suburb,” Blair said. “SBI California is a subsidiary of State Bank of India, which is controlled by the Indian government.”

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House Passes Bill Preventing Credit Card Companies from Tracking Gun Sales

On July 14, 2026, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to block credit card companies from tracking gun and ammunition sales.

The bill, H.R. 1181, passed on a vote of 221 to 201. Two-hundred-and-fifteen Republicans voted for the bill, along with five Democrats and one Independent.

H.R. 1181 is sponsored by Riley Moore (R-WV).

Breitbart News reported Moore’s introduction of the bill on February 12, 2025, noting that he titled it the “Protecting Privacy in Purchases Act.”

He introduced it after major credit card companies succumbed to the gun control lobby during the Biden Administration and made plans to track the sales of guns and ammo.

For example, on September 11, 2022, Breitbart News pointed out Visa caved to pressure from gun control groups and New York Democrats, agreeing to flag gun and ammo purchases via a merchant code. The Associated Press observed that Mastercard and other major credit card companies also agreed to flag gun sales. On March 2, 2023, Breitbart News noted Discover was slated to begin tracking gun and ammunition purchases with the new MCC in April 2023.

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Banks Have Been Lending to Illegal Aliens. The Trump Administration Just Stepped In.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, along with two other federal regulators, has officially issued new guidance to banks recommending that they stop issuing loans to illegal aliens, a practice that is legal under current law. Regulators also pushed financial institutions to reconsider providing credit cards and mortgages to illegal aliens.

The Director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, explained that American banks have been making “lots” of loans to illegal aliens, creating significant financial risk for lenders who may never recover the money they’ve loaned out if that alien is deported. He added that the measure is intended to increase financial stability and suggested it was prompted by a “surprising” finding by federal regulators, presumably regarding the volume of loans being issued to individuals without citizenship or legal immigration status.

“Why would loans even be going to illegal immigrants in the first place?” Hasset was asked on Fox News.

“Right, they shouldn’t have been going there in the first place, and the bottom line is that if a bank is making lots of loans to people that might be deported because they have a criminal record or whatever, then obviously that person is probably not going to pay back the loan,” Hassett replied. “And so we view this as a financial stability measure that makes a great deal of sense. And it’s, I guess, the interesting thing is that the regulators felt they had to issue that guidance, presumably because of something they discovered that was surprising.”

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