Saule Omarova, Biden’s nominee to head, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, called for the “debanking” of what she called “socially sub-optimal industries”

While some focus on Biden’s nominee to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Saule Omarova, education in the former Soviet Union and claims that she is a Marxist, she is in favor of using the “debanking” of what she called “socially sub-optimal industries.” This is what happened with the Obama administration’s “Operation chokepoint.” Try running a company without someone to handle credit cards, lines of credit, check cashing, and other things that financial institutions do. It is possible, just much more costly. It appears that the Biden administration also prefers politicizing lending.

How did Operation Chokepoint operate?

Officials at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), for instance, simply had to inform the banks they were overseeing that the government considered certain types of their customers “high risk.” The mere implication of a threat was enough to pressure banks into closing accounts, because no U.S. bank wants anything to do with extra audits or investigations from their regulator, much less additional operating restrictions or civil and criminal charges.

Norbert Michel, “Newly Unsealed Documents Show Top FDIC Officials Running Operation Choke Point,” Forbes, November 5, 2018.

In one of the last executive actions of the Trump administration, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency published an important final “Fair Access to Financial Services” rule requiring that large banks and federal savings associations make lending decisions based upon “individualized, quantitative risk-based analysis and management of customer risk.”

But the Biden administration has announced that “it has paused publication of its rule to ensure large banks provide all customers fair access to their services.” The rule was to have taken effect on April 1.