All Roads Lead To Chokepoint
As we noted last week, HFSC’s anti-ESG agenda includes a strong poke at banks and their regulators, going beyond the climate-risk concerns that lie at the center of these sessions also to resurrect efforts during the Trump Administration to sanction any bank that decides on reputational or other grounds not to lend to a creditworthy, legal business (see FSM Report ESG3). Much is said in this context about “Operation Chokepoint,” a decade-plus old effort by the FDIC and OCC to block bank exposures to payday lenders, firearms firms, or others the agencies believed posed so much reputational risk as to make the loans unsafe or unsound.