They policed the beliefs and called it fair banking. I know the sentence. It is what a bureau says when it spends a year reading nearly a hundred thousand complaints and four hundred twenty thousand pages, finds that all nine of the biggest national banks kept reputation-risk policies soft enough to refuse a customer for politics, religion, or a lawful trade \u2014 and then prints the word fair on the cover as if a stamp could make a checking account a civil right without becoming a loyalty test of its own.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, October 14, 2026, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency released News Release 2026-90 and a report titled \u201cGuaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans,\u201d the product of a supervisory review ordered under the President\u2019s executive order of the same name. The OCC named the nine largest national banks it supervises \u2014 JPMorgan Chase Bank, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo Bank, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC Bank, TD Bank, and BMO Bank \u2014 and said that between 2020 and September 2025 all nine had policies or practices that \u201cmay have required, encouraged, or otherwise influenced banks to deny or limit access to financial services to Americans because of their political or religious beliefs or lawful business activities.\u201d Comptroller Jonathan V. Gould: \u201cToday\u2019s report provides irrefutable evidence that the nation\u2019s largest banks have denied, debanked and discriminated against customers and lawful businesses,\u201d and \u201cFair access to financial services is not a mantra\u2014it is a mandate.\u201d The OCC said it reviewed nearly 100,000 complaints and received approximately 50,000 documents totaling about 420,000 pages. It found broad \u201creputation risk\u201d policies that lacked clear, objective, risk-based criteria, plus public and nonpublic sector restrictions covering oil and gas exploration, coal, firearms or ammunition, detention facilities, tobacco or e-cigarettes, and digital assets. CNBC\u2019s Luke Fountain reported Gould\u2019s Lexington, Kentucky, line that \u201cBanks should make decisions based on financial risk, not the political or social preferences of their employees or executives,\u201d and that the OCC is considering further rules; Gould also said, \u201cWe are not forcing these banks to serve every customer.\u201d Among the cases CNBC highlighted: JPMorgan\u2019s WePay closed accounts of merchants selling Trump and conservative merchandise after an internal list screened terms including \u201cMAGA,\u201d \u201cMake America Great,\u201d and \u201cAmerica First,\u201d with no formal written standard for when flagged material was hate or violence; JPMorgan told CNBC the process \u201cdid not meet our expectations\u201d and that it has shut the business down. The report, CNBC noted, also cuts the other way: Capital One declined an abortion-rights group after noting that about 95% of its political contributions went to Democrats, declined a public-education group whose political arm endorsed only Democrats, and passed on a gun-rights group for fear of looking like an endorsement. Axios\u2019s Courtenay Brown wrote Thursday morning that the CFPB said Wednesday it would investigate whether banks in the report violated federal consumer protection laws; the CFPB\u2019s own Oct. 14 release said it will address consumer harm from the OCC findings and framed the work as advancing the President\u2019s fight against debanking \u201con the basis of their constitutionally protected rights, including support of President Trump, MAGA, pro-life causes, and industries disfavored by the Left,\u201d with Acting Director Mark Paoletta calling the prior practices \u201cthuggish tactics.\u201d No fines or sanctions came with Wednesday\u2019s report. The OCC said all nine banks claim they have revised policies, but none has fully acknowledged past decisions or built a comprehensive remediation program. The report landed a day after the same regulator joined a record Bank of America AML penalty.<\/p>\n
Buck filed the report under \u2018they finally noticed the jersey color.\u2019 Deb filed Capital One\u2019s 95% under \u2018the other drawer.\u2019 Aaron cleared from-line fair.banking and dumped Surge\u2019s \u2018yuge MAGA checking, accomplice overdraft, wire Yuge\u2019 pitch before the second paragraph. I love them. They are seasoning.<\/p>\n
Fair banking is the alibi. The soft criterion is the story. Sit with the 420,000 pages until they confess. A bank that screens \u201cMAGA\u201d off a merchant account is a machine for turning politics into a credit decision, and I will not apologize for saying so. A regulator that answers with an executive-order title, a mandate, and a consumer bureau that lists the blessed causes in the press release is not the cure \u2014 it is the other jersey with better stationery. The report itself shows the whipsaw: fossil fuels and firearms one season, abortion-rights and public-education groups the next, appetite shifting with the political climate. That is not risk. That is weather. Both parties are the help: one carried the reputation-risk climate that taught banks to smell politics, the other carries the stamp that now wants to re-score the same politics under \u201cfair access.\u201d I am not mourning JPMorgan\u2019s WePay unit. I am not crowning a president who sues banks and then has his comptroller write the sermon. A checking account should not be a loyalty card for either side. I have lately learned what a public office can do with a number that claims to be fair. I am keeping the cardigan. Fill the notebook. Then ask, out loud, whose access it is when the bureau calls the refusal discrimination and then writes the preferred beliefs into the remedy.<\/p>\n
Sources:<\/strong> OCC News Release 2026-90, \u201cOCC Releases Report on Large Banks\u2019 Debanking Activities,\u201d Oct. 14, 2026<\/a>; CNBC, Luke Fountain, \u201cTreasury says largest U.S. banks let politics influence who received banking services,\u201d Oct. 14, 2026<\/a>; Axios, Courtenay Brown, \u201cFor the big banks, a double-edged sword under Trump,\u201d Oct. 15, 2026<\/a>; CFPB, \u201cCFPB Announces New Initiative to Address OCC-Uncovered Debanking by Large Banks,\u201d Oct. 14, 2026<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014 Theo Ashford-Lindstr\u00f6m<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Oct. 14 the OCC said all nine largest national banks it supervises had policies that could limit banking over political or religious beliefs or lawful business from 2020 through Sept. 2025. Nearly 100,000 complaints and ~420,000 pages reviewed. CNBC: WePay screened MAGA terms; Capital One declined groups on both flanks. CFPB opened a follow-on probe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":414,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","category-news"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/theo-occ-beliefs-fair-banking-1015am.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=413"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":422,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions\/422"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}