How Political Pressure is Reshaping Banking and Targeting Entrepreneurs
In a recent conversation on the Joe Rogan Experience, Marc Andreessen, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, revealed shocking details about how individuals and companies are being “debanked”—kicked out of the financial system due to political beliefs or involvement in certain industries. From crypto entrepreneurs to political opponents, Marc discusses how the lines between government influence and private banking decisions are blurring, leading to a covert system of financial exclusion.
Summary: In their conversation, Marc Andreessen explains the growing trend of “debanking,” where individuals and companies are cut off from banking services due to their political stance or industry involvement. He details how financial regulators label certain people as Politically Exposed Persons (PEP), leading banks to deny them service under pressure from the government. This discussion highlights how crypto founders, fintech entrepreneurs, and even those in legalized sectors like marijuana and firearms, are being systematically excluded from the banking system. Andreessen paints a picture of an emerging system where private banks are used to enforce government agendas without direct intervention or accountability.
TL;DR: Marc Andreessen discusses with Joe Rogan how financial institutions are systematically excluding individuals and businesses due to political pressure, a process called “debanking.” Crypto entrepreneurs, tech founders, and those with politically unfavorable views are particularly targeted.
Transcript:
Marc Andreessen: Can you give me an example? You know, debanking. This is where a lot of the debanking comes from, is these agencies. So, debanking is when you as either a person or your company are literally kicked out of the banking system.
Joe Rogan: Like they did to Kanye.
Marc Andreessen: Exactly, like they did to Kanye. My partner Ben’s father has been debanked.
Joe Rogan: Really?
Marc Andreessen: We had an employee…
Joe Rogan: For what?
Marc Andreessen: For having the wrong politics. For saying unacceptable things. Under current banking regulations… Okay, here’s a great thing. Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the last 20 years, there’s now a category called a politically exposed person. PEP. And if you were a PEP, you were required by financial regulators to kick them out of your bank.
Joe Rogan: What?
Marc Andreessen: You’re not allowed to have them.
Joe Rogan: But what if you’re politically on the left?
Marc Andreessen: That’s fine.
Joe Rogan: No, really?
Marc Andreessen: Because they’re not politically exposed.
Joe Rogan: So no one on the left gets debanked?
Marc Andreessen: I have not heard of a single instance of anyone on the left getting debanked.
Joe Rogan: Can you tell me what the person that you know did? What they said that got them debanked?
Marc Andreessen: Oh, well, David Horowitz is a right wing. He’s pro-Trump. I mean, he’s said all kinds of things. He’s been very anti-Islamic terrorism. He’s been very worried about immigration, all these things.
Joe Rogan: And they debanked him for that?
Marc Andreessen: Yeah, they debanked him. So you get kicked out of your bank account. You get kicked out of the… You can’t do credit card transactions. By the way, you can’t run…
Joe Rogan: How is that legal?
Marc Andreessen: Well, exactly. So this is the thing. And then you go to this thing of like, well, there’s no… This is where the government and the companies get intertwined. Back to your fascism point, which is there’s a constitutional amendment that says the government can’t restrict your speech, but there’s no constitutional amendment that says the government can’t debank you.
Joe Rogan: Right.
Marc Andreessen: And so if they can’t do the one thing, then they do the other thing. And then they don’t have to debank you. They just have to put pressure on the private company banks to do it. And then the private company banks do it because they’re expected to.
Joe Rogan: But the government gets to say, we didn’t do it. It was the private company that did it.
Marc Andreessen: And, of course, JPMorgan can decide who they want to have as customers, of course, right, because they’re a private company. And so it’s this sleight of hand that happens. So it’s basically it’s a privatized sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do to Iran.
Joe Rogan: Whoa.
Marc Andreessen: Just kick you out of the financial system. And so this has been happening to all the crypto entrepreneurs in the last four years. This has been happening to a lot of the fintech entrepreneurs, anybody trying to start any kind of new banking service because they’re trying to protect the big banks. And then this has been happening, by the way, also in legal fields of economic activity that they don’t like. And so a lot of this started about 15 years ago with this thing called Operation Trump Point, where they decided to as marijuana started to become legal, as prostitution started to become legal, and then guns, which there’s always a fight about. Under the Obama administration, they started to de-bank legal marijuana businesses, escort businesses and then gun shops, just like your gun manufacturers.
Joe Rogan: And just like you’re done, you’re out of the banking system.
Marc Andreessen: And so if you’re running a medical marijuana dispensary in 2012, like you, guess what? You’re doing your business all in cash because you literally can’t get a bank account. You can’t get a visa terminal. You can’t process transactions. You can’t do payroll. You can’t do direct deposit. You can’t get insurance. Like none of that stuff is you’ve been sanctioned. None of that stuff is available. And then this administration extended that concept to apply it to tech founders, crypto founders, and then just generally political opponents. So that’s been like super pernicious.
Joe Rogan: I wasn’t aware of that.
Marc Andreessen: Oh, 100%. So it was Operation Trump Point 1.0 was 15 years ago against the pot and the guns. Trump Point 2.0 is primarily against their political enemies and then to their disfavored tech startups. And it’s hit the tech world. Like we’ve had like 30 founders de-banked in the last four years.
Joe Rogan: Real?
Marc Andreessen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s been a big recurring pattern.
Joe Rogan: 30?
Marc Andreessen: This is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump. It’s like we just can’t live in this world. We can’t live in a world where somebody starts a company that’s a completely legal thing and then they literally like get sanctioned and embargoed by the United States government through a completely unaccountable. By the way, no due process. None of this is written down. There’s no rules. There’s no court. There’s no decision process. There’s no appeal. Who do you appeal to? Who do you go to to get your bank account back?
Joe Rogan: God.
Marc Andreessen: And then there’s also the civil asset forfeiture side of it, which is right the other side.
Joe Rogan: And that doesn’t happen to us, but that happens to people in a lot of places now who get arrested and all of a sudden the state takes their money.
Marc Andreessen: Yeah, that happens to people if they get pulled over and they have a large amount of cash in some states.
Joe Rogan: Right.
Marc Andreessen: There have been well-publicized examples of there was some investigation into safe deposit boxes and the next thing you know the Feds have seized all the contents of the safe deposit boxes and that stuff never gets returned. And so it’s this. And this is when Trump says the deep state. The way we would describe it is it’s administrative power. It’s political power being administered, not through legislation. So there’s no defined law that covers this. It’s not through regulation. Right. There’s nothing you can you can’t go sue a regulator to fix this. It’s not through any kind of court judgment. It’s just raw power. It’s just raw administrative power. It’s the government or politicians just deciding that things are going to be a certain way. And then they just apply pressure until they get it.
Joe Rogan: So what happens to those 30 tech people that, you know, start to go into a different field, like try to do something different and try to try to try to get, you know, complete upending of your life.
Marc Andreessen: Yeah, complete upending of your life and try to try to try to change your life. Try to get out of that. Try to get away from the eye of Sauron. Try to get out of whatever zone got you into this and keep applying for new bank accounts at different banks and hope that at some point a bank will say, you know, OK, you know, it’s OK. We’ve checked in. It’s now all right.
Joe Rogan: Whoa. But there’s no.
Marc Andreessen: So what do they do with their money? Like what happens?
Joe Rogan: I mean, you go to cash.
Marc Andreessen: I mean, you go to cash.
Joe Rogan: You can’t have a.
Marc Andreessen: Yeah.
Joe Rogan: So where do you put it?
Marc Andreessen: Under your mattress.
Joe Rogan: Yes, exactly.
Marc Andreessen: Yeah.
Joe Rogan: That is so insane. If someone has 30 million dollars in the bank and they get debanked.
Marc Andreessen: Diamonds, art. You know, do you? I don’t know. Go overseas somewhere.
Joe Rogan: Holy shit.
Marc Andreessen: Yeah. Yeah. And just like it just it just happens. And again, it’s really, really important. There’s no fingerprints like there’s no.
Joe Rogan: Right.
Marc Andreessen: There’s no person who there’s no stick above the strings.
Joe Rogan: Yeah, exactly.
Marc Andreessen: Right. It just happened. And we can trace it back because we understand exactly, you know, we know, we know that we know the politicians involved and we know how the agencies work and we know how the pressure is applied and we know that these banks get phone calls and so forth. And so we can loosely like we understand the flow of power as it happens. But when you’re on the receiving end of this, your specific instance of it, like you can’t trace it back.
Joe Rogan: So these what are the instances like what is the company? What are they trying to do and how do they run afoul?
Marc Andreessen: All the crypto startups in the last basically four years. So you remember the crypto thing got like really, you know, sort of everybody got excited and like NFTs and like all that stuff. And then it just like stopped.
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
Marc Andreessen: And the reason it stopped is because basically every crypto founder, every crypto startup, they either got debanked personally and forced out of the industry or their company got debanked and so it couldn’t keep operating or they got prosecuted, charged or they got threatened with being charged. This is a fun this is a fun twist. It’s a fun little twist. So the SEC sort of has been trying to kill the crypto industry under Biden. And this has been a big issue for us because we’re the biggest crypto startup investor. The SEC can they can investigate you. They can subpoena you. They can prosecute you. They can do all these things. But they don’t have to do any of those things to really damage you. All they have to do is they issue what’s called a Wells Notice. And the Wells Notice is a notification that you may be charged at some point in the future. You’re like on notice that you might be doing something wrong and they might be coming after you at some point in the future.
Joe Rogan: Oh, my God.
Marc Andreessen: Okay. So terrifying. The eye of Sauron is on you. Now trying to be a company with a Wells Notice doing business with anybody else.
Joe Rogan: Oh, my God.
Marc Andreessen: Right. Try to try to work with a big company. Try to get access to a bank. Try to try to do.
Joe Rogan: So that’s when they support DEI initiatives.
Marc Andreessen: Yeah. Well, then the SEC under Biden became a SEC under Biden became a direct application of exactly. So DEI, they started. They did a lot with that. And then all the ESG stuff. And ESG is a very malleable concept. And they piled all kinds of new requirements into that. So through that, through this process, the SEC could basically just simply dictate what companies do with no accountability at all. Like there’s no, you know, there’s no oversight. There are hearings where they get yelled at, but like nothing changed. Nothing ever happened in a hearing that ever changed anything.
Joe Rogan: Wow.
Marc Andreessen: It was just the raw application of power. Right.
Joe Rogan: And so. And this is your friends. This has happened to.
Marc Andreessen: Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. And we had, like I said, we had an employee who got debanked because he had crypto in his job title. He was doing crypto policy for us. And his bank booted him because he.
Joe Rogan: That’s it.
Marc Andreessen: Because they did it. They did. They did a screen across.
Joe Rogan: That’s what they told us is they did a screen across their their customer base. Anyone with crypto.
Marc Andreessen: Because because anybody with crypto became a politically exposed person because.
Joe Rogan: Wow.
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This page was last updated on November 30, 2024.
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