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10 23 ODDLY BLANK SEE BAK
SEE WALL ST BANKS
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TRUMP PARDONS BOFA JPM
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heated gmail 9 26
some blame where it’s due.
Fossil fuel companies, obviously. (Truly, no clue how those executives sleep at night.) And I gave you my two cents on big ag.
Also:
Big banks: Since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, 60 banks have provided $7.9 trillion in financing to fossil fuel companies, with the top four banks alone—JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America—providing more than $1.64 trillion.
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The Financial Times reported Friday morning that the big banks that Wall Street is betting on are failing in private credit markets. It's something that New Republic writer Logan McMillen is sounding the alarm about because it is the same thing that happened in the 2007 and 2008 global economic collapse.
This week, the Federal Reserve likely freaked out economic experts when it demanded the largest banks "detail their exposure to the opaque, multitrillion-dollar private credit market," said McMillen. "Then, almost simultaneously, word broke that some of those same banks are imminently launching a credit default swap index with S&P Global, targeting that same market."
McMillen cautioned that the U.S.'s macroeconomic program is quickly falling apart under the stress of President Donald Trump's war against Iran, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the rise in inflation.
It comes as the "U.S. Treasury is now desperately trying to finance a $1.9 trillion deficit without a large pool of captive foreign buyers. Trump "failed to prepare" for the crisis. A former Trump strategist told CNN last month that the president thought Iran would be just as easy as Venezuela was.
Nate Swanson, a former Trump staffer and current senior fellow and director of the Iran Strategy Project at The Atlantic Council, assumes that Trump thought the whole operation would be easy and he'd be successful
Trump was coming off a "win" from his June strikes and from capturing Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. In the past, Trump was able to kill Iranian military officer Qasem Soleimani "with virtually no repercussions," said Swanson.
Trump has done nothing to prepare for the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and worse, he's done nothing to protect the U.S. economy from the ensuing disaster after the bombing began.
"China is dumping U.S. Treasuries at a rate not seen since the Global Financial Crisis, while stalwart buyers like Japan are seeing their bond yield rates creep up to their highest levels in 27 years," said McMillen, explaining it isn't healthy for the macroeconomy.
What happens this weekend might mark a shift that will be felt for at least a year or more "in the form of a liquidity crisis."
"The Fed’s request that major banks detail their exposure to the private credit market should terrify risk assessors. When macroeconomists picked through the rubble of 2008, many landed on the conclusion that there had been a catastrophic mispricing of risk," McMillen said.
Credit rating agencies continued to claim that toxic subprime mortgages were somehow AAA-rated. Regulators in 2008 at the very least knew where the underlying assests were, McMillen explained. That isn't happening with the $2 trillion private credit market. It's a black box hidden in "regulatory shadows to facilitate high-risk corporate loans that traditional banks were forced to abandon after the passage of Dodd-Frank."
A major indicator of danger comes from a March Politicoreport revealing that investors are pulling their money after a "string of blow-ups." At the same time, the world of artificial intelligence has posed a risk to some software companies. So, investors are growing so worried that they're pulling their money out to such an extreme that they hit withdrawal limits.
Those limits on withdrawals "from many of these private funds tell us there’s a bank run taking place behind the velvet ropes, in the VIP section," cautioned McMillen.
So, Wall Street is offering a product for another possible crash. In 2008, " played a significant role in the collapse of the housing market. Now they're being introduced into the $2 trillion market at a time when there is a "liquidity crisis." It's also happening as the Federal Reserve admits it doesn't understand what's going on and has asked banks to detail their exposure to the private credit market. McMillen described it as a kind of "mirror maze of transactions for regulators to navigate."
For about 12 to 18 months in 2007, a small handful of mortgage defaults proved capable of triggering a cascade of multibillion-dollar payouts across the globe." These were after the ABX index (Asset-Backed Securities Index) was created. It was a kind of "synthetic collateralized debt obligation market" that ultimately reached $5 trillion in value. It was just one kind of "credit-default swaps.) Investors were then able to make bets on those investments"without ever owning the underlying asset."
It ultimately led to "a small handful of mortgage defaults ... triggering a cascade of multibillion-dollar payouts across the globe," said McMillen.
Now, the same thing might happen again, only with the private credit market that handles $2 trillion in corporate debt.
"Wall Street is once again seeding flammable barrels of fictitious capital in the financial sector, virtually guaranteeing that if the underlying loans bomb, the blast radius will be much larger than the asset class itself," wrote McMillen.
In 2008, "there was still an 'adult' in the room," he explained. Now, the U.S. is a mess fiscally, and when it comes to foreign relationships, the president isn't winning a lot of friends. Back then, McMillen said that the U.S. had a "clean-enough balance sheet" to navigate the losses and keep things moving.
"Today, U.S. government debt is equal to 122 percent–124 percent of annual gross domestic product," he cautioned. "In the past, this was manageable because the petrodollar paradigm forced the rest of the world to buy U.S. Treasuries. But with the Carter Doctrine scuppered, the Strait of Hormuz closed, and the State Department weaponizing the SWIFT system through sanctions, those once-captive buyers are finally beginning to abandon the U.S. dollar."
It means the U.S. "will be backed into a corner with only a few viable exits." It means the banks would have to be bailed out for the second time in 20 years to prevent a global collapse. The American dollar and credit outlook would be the casualty while everyday people are forced into an "austerity crisis."
"When the domestic economy faced the last crisis of this magnitude, in the late 1970s, Fed Chairman Paul Volcker hiked interest rates, intentionally triggering a recession that broke the back of organized labor. The “Volcker shock” served as the founding act of the bipartisan neoliberal consensus, establishing a macroeconomic and foreign policy paradigm where the U.S. offshored its industrial base and policed maritime shipping lanes in exchange for cheap imports," explained McMillen.
In March, AlterNet wrote about one of Trump's big plans: opening these risky investment markets to anyone who wants to participate using their retirement funds. Now there is a fear that doing so could push markets teetering on the brink over the cliff.
"The Labor Department is planning to roll out a long-awaited proposal that would offer workers invested in retirement products like 401(k)s access to the so-called private markets — a class of highly coveted but risky investments that have historically been walled off from the masses," Politico explained last month.
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raw story
Criminal corporations are not people — but Trump just pardoned one anyway - Raw Story
In what could be a U.S. first, President Donald Trump last week pardoned a criminal corporation, a move that largely flew under the proverbial radar amid his pardon spree for white-collar criminals including at least one of his supporters.
On March 28, Trump pardoned HDR Global Trading, the owner and operator of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX; company co-founders Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed; and former business development chief Gregory Dwyer.
The company and the four men hads each pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Bank Secrecy Act "by willfully failing to establish, implement, and maintain an adequate" anti-money laundering program, as required by law. In January, the U.S. Department of Justice sentenced BitMEX to a fine of $100 million, while the executives were sentenced to criminal probation and ordered to pay civil fines.
While experts noted that Trump acted within his rights to pardon the corporation, there is no known precedent for a president taking such action.
Noting the U.S. Supreme Court's highly controversial 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling—which affirmed corporate personhood and the dubious notion that unlimited outside spending on political campaigns is free speech—Stanford Law School professor Bernadette Meyler toldThe Intercept that "while we have seen the rise of a trend of treating corporations as persons in other areas of law, we haven't seen that so far in the area of pardoning."
Kimberly Wehle, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and preeminent pardons expert, wrote for The Hill on Tuesday that the BitMEX pardons send the message that "companies involved in financial crimes don't have to worry about accountability under this president, as least when it comes to crypto, for reasons that he has no incentive to ever make known."
"BitMEX can continue its prior criminal practices with federal impunity, and maybe even rely on the pardon to thwart future investigations into related conduct by federal lawmakers or state prosecutors," Wehle added. "The biggest losers in this deal are, once again, the American people, including the more than 77 million who might finally be realizing that they voted for lawlessness last November."
"The biggest losers in this deal are, once again, the American people."
Brandon Garrett, a Duke University law professor specializing in corporate crime and punishment, told The Interceptthat the BitMEX pardons are part of a wider pattern of impunity under Trump, who "now seems to be systematically pardoning corporate malefactors left and right without respect, really, to any real serious consideration about the merits of the cases [or] the larger policy implications of issuing these pardons."
As the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen recently noted, "The Trump administration has dropped, withdrawn, or halted investigations and enforcement actions against over 100 corporations in its first two months in office."
Beneficiaries include companies owned or led by Trump donors or allies, including private prison giant GEO Group; Zelle network banks JPMorgan and Bank of America; crypto firms Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, OpenSea, Ripple, and Robinhood; and Elon Musk's SpaceX.
"Trump's corporate pardons show the president's true base is the billionaire executives and corporate elites lining up to indulge their greed at the trough of Trump's corruption," Public Citizen research director Rick Claypool said last week. "Trump's soft-on-corporate crime approach invites a corporate crime spree and potentially catastrophic abuses for America's consumers, workers, and communities."
Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman added that the Trump administration's "effective no-enforcement policy against corporations virtually guarantees more financial scams, more workplace discrimination, more poisoning of the air and water, more food contamination, more fraud, more disease, and more preventable death."
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an no lnx
It's official: The American Dream is dead — and Trump's billionaires are to blame
(L-R) Priscilla Chan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, businessman Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and businessman Elon Musk, among other dignitaries, attend Donald Trump's inauguration as the next President of the United States.
Thom Hartmann March 12, 2025
Trump ordered Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser to evict homeless people from various parts of Washington DC. He then cut millions of dollars in federal support to house poor people.
He didn’t make any suggestions about solving homelessness, mind you; he simply wants the problem moved out of sight. It’s a classic Republican strategy, and will work about as well as putting a Band-Aid over cancer.
It wasn’t always this way in America.
Back in 1967, a friend of mine and I hitchhiked from East Lansing, Michigan to San Francisco to spend the summer in Haight-Ashbury. One ride dropped us off in Sparks, Nevada, and within minutes of putting our thumbs out a city police car stopped and arrested us for vagrancy.
The cop, a young guy with an oversize mustache who was apologetic for the city’s policy, drove us to the desert a mile or so beyond the edge of town, where we hitchhiked standing by a distressing light-post covered with graffiti reading “39 hours without a ride,” “going on our third day,” and “anybody got any water?”
Vagrancy laws were so 20th century.
The explosion in housing costs — driven in large part by Republican policies — have triggered our crisis of homelessness.
The problem with housing inflation is so severe today that without it the nation’s overall core CPI inflation rate would be in the neighborhood of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s 2 percent goal.
Both homelessness and today’s inflation are the result of America — unlike many other countries — allowing housing to become a commodity that can be traded and speculated in by financial markets and overseas investors.
Forty-four years into America’s Reaganomics experiment, homelessness has gone from an occasional, local problem to a nationwide crisis. Rarely, though, do you hear that Wall Street — a prime beneficiary of Reagan’s deregulation campaign — is causing it.
Thirty-two percent seems to be the magic threshold, according to research funded by the real estate listing company Zillow. When neighborhoods hit rent rates in excess of 32 percent of neighborhood income, homelessness explodes.
And we’re seeing it play out right in front of us in cities across America because a handful of Wall Street billionaires want to make a killing.
Again, it wasn’t always this way in America.
Housing prices have spun out of control since my dad bought his house in 1957 when I was six years old. He got a Veteran’s Administration-subsidized loan and picked up the brand-new 3-bedroom-1-bath ranch house my 3 brothers and I grew up in, in suburban south Lansing, Michigan. It cost him $13,000, which was about twice what he made every year working a union job in a tool-and-die shop.
When my dad bought his home in the 1950s the median price of a single-family house was 2.2 times the median American family income. Today, the Fed says, the median house sells for $479,500 while the median American personal income is $41,000 — a ratio of more than ten-to-one between housing costs and annual income.
As the Zillow study notes:
“Across the country, the rent burden already exceeds the 32 percent [of median income] threshold in 100 of the 386 markets included in this analysis….”
And wherever housing prices become more than three times annual income, homelessness stalks communities like the grim reaper.
We’re told that America’s cities have seen this increase in housing costs since the 1950s in some part because of the growing wealth and population of this country. There were, after all, 168 million people in the US the year my dad bought his house; today there are 330 million.
And it’s true that we haven’t been building enough new housing, particularly low income housing, as 43 years of neoliberal Reaganomics have driven down wages and income for working class people relative to all of their expenses while stopping the construction of virtually any new government-subsidized low-income housing.
But that’s not the only, or even the main dynamic, driving housing prices into the stratosphere — and, as a consequence, the crisis in homelessness — over the past decade. You can thank speculation for much of that.
As the Zillow-funded study noted:
“This research demonstrates that the homeless population climbs faster when rent affordability — the share of income people spend on rent — crosses certain thresholds. In many areas beyond those thresholds, even modest rent increases can push thousands more Americans into homelessness.”
So, if it wasn’t always this way in America, how did we get here?
It started with a wave of foreign buyers over the past 30 years (particularly from China, Canada, Mexico, India and Colombia) who, in just the one single year of 2020, picked up over 154,000 homes as their way of parking money in America.
Which is part of why there are over 20 times more empty houses in America than there are homeless people.
As Marketwatch noted in an article titled “The Danger of Foreign Buyers Gobbling Up American Homes”:
“Unusual high appreciation of the aforementioned urban centers is due to the ever growing influx of foreign buyers — mostly wealthy Chinese — who view American residential real estate as the safest investment commodity. … According to a National Realtors Association survey, the Chinese spent $22 billion on U.S. housing in 12 months through March 2014…. [Other foreign buyers primarily include] Canadians, British, Indians and Mexicans.”
But foreign investment has been down for the past few years; what’s taken over and is really driving home prices today are massive, multi-billion-dollar US-based funds that sweep into neighborhoods and buy everything available, bidding against families and driving up housing prices.
It is, in other words, real estate speculators like Trump and his billionaire buddies.
As noted in a Wall Street Journal article titled “Meet Your New Landlord: Wall Street,” in just one suburb (Spring Hill) of Nashville, “In all of Spring Hill, four firms … own nearly 700 houses … [which] amounts to about 5% of all the houses in town.”
This is the tiniest tip of the iceberg.
“On the first Tuesday of each month,” notes the Journal article about a similar phenomenon in Atlanta, investors “toted duffels stuffed with millions of dollars in cashier’s checks made out in various denominations so they wouldn’t have to interrupt their buying spree with trips to the bank…”
The same thing is happening in cities and suburbs all across America; the investment goliaths use finely-tuned computer algorithms to sniff out houses they can turn into rental properties, making over-market and unbeatable cash bids often within minutes of a house hitting the market.
After stripping neighborhoods of homes families can buy, they then begin raising rents as high as the market will bear.
In the Nashville suburb of Spring Hill, for example, the vice-mayor, Bruce Hull, told the Journal you used to be able to rent “a three bedroom, two bath house for $1,000 a month.” Today, the Journal notes:
“The average rent for 148 single-family homes in Spring Hill owned by the big four [Wall Street investor] landlords was about $1,773 a month…”
Ryan Dezember, in his book Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare, describes the story of a family trying to buy a home in Phoenix. Every time they entered a bid, they were outbid instantly, the price rising over and over, until finally the family’s father threw in the towel.
“Jacobs was bewildered,” writes Dezember. “Who was this aggressive bidder?”
Turns out it was Blackstone Group, now the world’s largest real estate investor. At the time they were buying $150 million worth of American houses every week, trying to spend over $10 billion. And that’s just a drop in the overall bucket.
In 2018, corporations bought 1 out of every 10 homes sold in America, according to Dezember, noting that, “Between 2006 and 2016, when the home ownership rate fell to its lowest level in fifty years, the number of renters grew by about a quarter.”
This all really took off around a decade ago, when Morgan Stanley published a 2011 report titled “The Rentership Society,” arguing that — in the wake of the 2008 Bush Housing Crash — snapping up houses and renting them back to people who otherwise would have wanted to buy them could be the newest and hottest investment opportunity for Wall Street’s billionaires and their funds.
Turns out, Morgan Stanley was right. Warren Buffett, KKR, and The Carlyle Group have all jumped into residential real estate, along with hundreds of smaller investment groups, and the National Home Rental Council has emerged as the industry’s premiere lobbying group, working to block rent control legislation and other efforts to regulate the industry.
As John Husing, the owner of Economics and Politics Inc., told The Tennessean newspaper:
“What you have are neighborhoods that are essentially unregulated apartment houses. It could be disastrous for the city.”
Meanwhile, as unionization levels here remain among the lowest in the developed world, the GOP’s ongoing war on working people continues to wipe out America’s families.
At the same time that housing prices, both to purchase and to rent, are being driven through the roof by foreign and Wall Street investors, a survey published by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health found that American families are in crisis.
Their study found:
— “Thirty-eight percent (38%) of [all] households across the nation report facing serious financial problems in the previous few months.
— “There is a sharp income divide in serious financial problems, as 59% of those with annual incomes below $50,000 report facing serious financial problems in the past few months, compared with 18% of households with annual incomes of $50,000 or more.
— “These serious financial problems are cited despite 67% of households reporting that in the past few months, they have received financial assistance from the government.
— “Another significant problem for many U.S. households is losing their savings during the COVID-19 outbreak. Nineteen percent (19%) of U.S. households report losing all of their savings during the COVID-19 outbreak and not currently having any savings to fall back on.
— “At the time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) eviction ban expired, 27% of renters nationally reported serious problems paying their rent in the past few months.”
These are not separate issues, and they are driving an explosion in homelessness.
The Zillow study found similarly damning data:
— “Communities where people spend more than 32 percent of their income on rent can expect a more rapid increase in homelessness.
— “Income growth has not kept pace with rents, leading to an affordability crunch with cascading effects that, for people on the bottom economic rung, increases the risk of homelessness.
— “The areas that are most vulnerable to rising rents, unaffordability, and poverty hold 15 percent of the U.S. population — and 47 percent of people experiencing homelessness.”
The Zillow study makes grim reading and is worth checking out. In community after community, when rent prices exceed 32 percent of median household income, homeless exploded. It’s measurable, predictable, and is destroying what’s left of the American working class, particularly minorities.
The loss of affordable homes also locks otherwise middle class families out of the traditional way wealth is accumulated — through home ownership: over 61% of all American middle-income family wealth is their home’s equity. And as families are priced out of ownership and forced to rent, they become more vulnerable to long-term economic struggles and homelessness.
Housing is one of the primary essentials of life. Nobody in America should be without it, and for society to work, housing costs must track incomes in a way that makes housing both available and affordable.
This requires government intervention in the so-called “free market” that Trump and Musk call “big government.”
— Last year, Canada banned most foreign buyers from buying residential property as a way of controlling their housing inflation.
— New Zealand similarly passed their no-foreigners law (except for Singaporeans and Australians) in 2018.
— Thailand requires a minimum investment of $1.2 million and the equivalent of a green card.
— Greece bans most non-EU citizens from buying real estate in most of the country.
:{— To buy residential housing in Denmark, it must be your primary residence and you must have lived in the country for at least 5 years.
— Vietnam, Austria, Hungary, and Cyprus also heavily restrict who can buy residential property, where, and under what terms.
This isn’t rocket science; the problem could be easily fixed by Congress if there was a genuine willingness to protect our real estate market from the vultures who’ve been circling it for years.
Unfortunately, when Clarence Thomas was the deciding vote to allow billionaires and hedge funds to legally bribe members of Congress in Citizens United, he and his four fellow Republicans opened the floodgates to “contributions” and “gifts” from foreign and Wall Street interests to pay off legislators to ignore the problem.
Tragically, there’s no lobbying group for the interests of average homeowners or the homeless, and the problem is made worse every day by the growing inequality resulting from Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax and deregulation policies.
It wasn’t always this way in America, and it doesn’t have to continue.
Trump’s tough-guy snarl at Washington DC’s Mayor Bowser last week reminds us that homelessness isn’t just something that spontaneously occurs: it’s the direct result of government policies.
Policies promoted by Trump and Republicans over the past four decades.
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In the years since the Great Recession, when housing prices dramatically fell, Wall Street investors have been buying large numbers of single-family homes to use as rentals. As of 2022, big investment firms owned nearly 600,000 such properties nationwide.
Critics say this practice drives up home prices and worsens the housing shortage, making it harder for families to afford to buy. Industry advocates dismiss such charges, arguing that large investment firms own a tiny fraction of single-family rental housing across the U.S. – less than 4% of the total.
As a professor of public policy at Georgia Tech, I wanted to understand how this trend was affecting my neighbors. So I analyzed more than 1 million property sales in the Atlanta metropolitan area from 2007 to 2016. Since the study period included the mortgage crisis, I excluded bulk sales, such as the packages of foreclosed homes, that aren’t available to typical homebuyers. I examined only arm’s-length transactions of single-family detached homes, where buyers and sellers act independently.
I found that global investment firms buying up local properties are indeed hurting Atlanta families – specifically, Black ones.
Neighborhood transformations
In the period I studied, homeownership declined across the Atlanta metro area by more than 5 percentage points, similar to a nationwide trend. For an average neighborhood, home purchasing by large corporate investors explained one-quarter of that decline.
But when I broke the analysis down by race, I found that Black families were hit much harder: Large investment firms buying up local properties explained fully three-quarters of the decline in African American homeownership. In contrast, non-Hispanic whites were largely unaffected.
It turns out that while Wall Street firms control just a sliver of the single-family rental market nationally, they can have much more influence at the local level. In the Atlanta metro area, these firms own nearly one-third of all single-family rental properties. They’re even more concentrated in predominantly Black neighborhoods, where more than 10 houses in a row can be owned by the same corporation.
In my study, I found that large investors tend to snap up housing in majority-nonwhite, lower-income suburban neighborhoods. This makes homebuying even more challenging for middle-class families of color, as they get pushed out of the bidding market by global investors.
Home is where the financial security is
Homeownership has long been one of the main pathways for the American middle class to accumulate wealth. Despite this, the national homeownership rate declined by 5.5 percentage points between 2007 and 2016, reaching a five-decade low of 62.9%. Although homeownership has rebounded somewhat since 2016, it remains below pre-2008 levels.
And who owns these homes is starkly divided by race. Between 2015 and 2019, more than 70% of white families owned a home, compared with just 41% of Black families, according to an analysis by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.
To be sure, policies like racial covenants, discriminatory mortgage lending practices and redlining fueled low homeownership rates for Black Americans long before the Great Recession. But global investors’ growing control of single-family homes only widens existing racial gaps in homeownership and wealth.
Directions for new research
While my study focused on Atlanta, it’s not the only place where residents are competing with global investors for housing. Investment firms’ single-family rental portfolios are largely concentrated in Sun Belt metro areas, including Phoenix, Charlotte and Jacksonville. It wouldn’t be surprising to see similar conflicts playing out in those cities.
Since my analysis stopped in 2016, I can’t be sure that Black Atlanta residents are still affected by Wall Street firms buying up housing. Many investment firms have recently been switching from a buy-to-rent business model to a build-to-rent model, which could complicate matters.
In the meantime, while residents and policymakers have claimed that large corporations don’t invest in local communities, researchers lack robust evidence this is the case. Academics should study whether properties owned by institutional landlords are more likely to be poorly maintained or have code violations, as anecdotal evidence suggests.
It’s also worth investigating whether big investment firms undermine local revenue collection by serially filing property tax appeals.
An open-source tool for housing policy research
It’s been hard for researchers to identify corporate-owned, single-family homes, since it requires proprietary real-estate data and labor-intensive number crunching. In a separate project, my colleagues and I have developed a simple, user-friendly methodology that gets around such challenges with the use of open-source software and public tax parcel data.
Local governments and nonprofits can use our methodology to unveil all the corporate-owned residential properties in any neighborhood and link them to outcomes such as code violations. Using data-driven approaches like this is an important step toward developing policy solutions.
Brian Y. An, Director of Master of Science in Public Policy Program & Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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ref report
despite 'Splashy' Net-Zero Vows, Big Banks Dumping Trillions Into Fossil Fuels
"With Wall Street banks leading the charge, these financial institutions are directly complicit in undermining a climate-stable future for us all."
March 30, 2022
Flouting their public vows to put themselves and their clients on a path to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, the world's 60 largest private banks have provided a total of $4.6 trillion in financing for the fossil fuel industry since the Paris Agreement entered into force in 2016.
That's according to the latest edition of Banking on Climate Chaos, an annual report that tracks the banking industry's funding of oil and gas initiatives that are threatening global hopes of reining in carbon pollution and averting climate disaster.
In 2021 alone, the report finds, the world's biggest private-sector banks financed oil and gas to the tune of $742 billion. That year, the 60 banks featured in the new analysis poured $185.5 billion into the 100 companies doing the most to expand the fossil-fuel sector worldwide through offshore drilling, fracking, coal mining, liquefied natural gas infrastructure, and more. Authored by Oil Change International, the Rainforest Action Network, the Indigenous Environmental Network, and other groups and endorsed by hundreds of organizations from around the world, the report published Wednesday spotlights the marked contrast between banks' public commitments to net-zero emissions targets and their actions, which reflect a continued stake in fossil fuel development.
The worst offenders in the banking industry, according to the report, are the U.S. financial behemoths JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America,which together accounted for 25% of all fossil fuel financing identified over the past six years.
The report highlights a number of specific projects, including the Mountain Valley Pipeline (funded by JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America), drilling in offshore Guyana (funded by JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and Bank of America), and the Line 3 Pipeline (funded by TD, Scotiabank, and the Bank of Montreal), efforts that have drawn fierce resistance from Indigenous communities.
"Indigenous peoples have long been leading the fight for the sacredness of the land, water, and Earth," Mea Johnson, divestment campaign coordinator with the Indigenous Environmental Network, said in a statement Wednesday. "Mother Earth has always given us what we need to thrive. We will not back down until our natural balance is restored and anyone helping fund the extractive destruction of our communities will be held accountable."
Alison Kirsch, research and policy manager at the Rainforest Action Network, added that "any further expansion of fossil fuels risks locking humanity into generations of climate catastrophe, yet the top fossil clients of the world's largest banks are still being showered with tens of billions of dollars even as they actively expand drilling, mining, fracking, and other fossil fuel development unabated."
"With Wall Street banks leading the charge," Kirsch added, "these financial institutions are directly complicit in undermining a climate-stable future for us all and must immediately end their support of any further fossil fuel infrastructure expansion."
The banks' financing decisions fly in the face of their own pledges to bring their policies into line with critical climate goals, such as achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a benchmark that 44 of the 60 banks profiled in the new report have backed.
"But global banks have massively supported the companies doing the most to open new oil and gas fields," notes the new report. "Banks with net-zero commitments last year... financed the top 20 upstream oil and gas expansion companies, potentially helping to lock the planet into decades of climate-warming emissions." According to the International Energy Agency, reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 would mean ensuring "no new oil and gas fields."
Adele Shraiman, a representative for theSierra Club's Fossil-Free Finance campaign, said Wednesday that the analysis "makes it clear that banks must clean up their act and stop funding the expansion of dirty fossil fuel projects like fracked gas exports, tar sands pipelines, and offshore drilling in order to align with what the science demands and what their own commitments require."
"Despite their splashy climate pledges, big banks have largely continued with business-as-usual and actually increased their overall fossil fuel financing since the Paris Agreement," said Shraiman. "As we look ahead to shareholder season, we'll be keeping up the pressure on the banks and their investors to take these critical reforms seriously and stop bankrolling the fossil fuel industry's reckless expansion plans."