The Highwire with Del Bigtree - TRUMP TAKES ON BIG BANKS AND DIGITAL CURRENCY

Episode Date: February 8, 2025

In the mere weeks back in office, President Trump has taken aim at big banks by stifling wasteful green initiatives, helped end a pathway toward central bank digital currency in the US, protected cryptocurrency, and called out banks by name for debanking those who go against their political ideologies.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

I want to go to Davos. Something else happened in Davos. This is the World Economic Forum. They had their yearly meeting there. It kind of went under the radar because of Trump's inauguration on Hath kid Jr. But we have Bill Winters. He's the CEO of Standard Charter Bank. And listen to what he had to say with that idea in mind.

Okay. It feels as though the mood music has changed. Many of the U.S. peers have pulled out of the Climate Alliance. Even Trump yesterday, President Trump, has plans to pull out of the Paris framework. Big setback to the Green Agenda. How is this going to impact the bank's role in promoting this sustainable economy? Importantly, I think while there's been a clear shift in narrative in particular in the U.S.,

also some other places, as far as I know, no banks have withdrawn their commitments to supporting a transition to a net zero economy. because in the long run, it's pretty clear that we need to disgorge ourselves from the reliance on fossil fuels. But when we set this up at Senator Trudder in the beginning, it was two prongs. One of us, we've got to do our bit to do the right thing vis-a-vis our clients because they want to transition to a net zero environment. But it requires massive investment. That's what we do. We come up with those dollars.

But two is we make money. It's a big business for us. And we gave the guidance externally a couple of years ago. that we'd make a billion dollars of income by 2026. We'll be pretty close for that in 2025. It's just a big business. I'm just a profitable business. So I don't want to sound too mercantilist about it,

but we do the right thing and we get paid for it. It's kind of win-win. I don't want to sound like a money-grubbing banker, but we make a lot of money on this green agenda, and I don't want to see it go away. And he's saying, I don't really care what leaders do. Leaders in the countries who are elected by the people.

We're making big business here. We're making money. So this is the game, baby, get behind this. And so what's interesting is that's the message they're getting. The banks are making money. But the message we're getting as the people is, you need to shut down your family farm in the UK in the Netherlands. You need to turn that over because of all the nitrogen.

You're going against the net zero agenda here. Right. And by the way, we're about to give a giant loan to some solar farms. And all the loggers are going to come and cut down all of your trees and, you know, do whatever to your land and then put in solar farms. And you see the investment, right? Yeah. If the green deal is all about, we have to go new, throw out everything that's old, start brand new ramp up companies. It's loans, loans, loans, money, you know, investments.

Of course, it's huge for banks. Every time you outlaw all of the existing technology and say, everyone has to go to the new thing. Everyone needs an electric car. Yeah. You know, new car loans, the people building the cars. I mean, the whole thing. Of course, it's a cash cow for all of the elitists and the rich. Yeah.

I mean, I don't know if he was supposed to say that out loud, but he did. It's really interesting that's on tape. And so it's interesting because he says, you know, banks, all the banks get behind our agenda. But what happens if you or I or the public doesn't want to get behind that agenda because of our conscious, our free will, our informed consent? Yeah. We get treated a little different. So remember in Canada, the truckers there during the pandemic, they could not change the border from the U.S. to Canada without getting that COVID vaccine. And they said, we're done with this.

We're going to protest. The banks didn't say, hey, that sounds great. They said, we're going to take your money away with the help of the government, and they debank them. Here's some of the headlines, just in case anybody doesn't remember this dark time. Ottawa blacklisted 201 companies sympathetic to the Freedom Convoy, another one, banks have been unfreezing accounts linked to the trucker protest. That's not just an isolated incident. This is banks can debank people, and this is behavior control. If anything they don't like about you, whether you don't want to take this medical,

device medical experimental shot at the time or anything. In fact, even your political ideology. Here's Trump at that same meeting in Davos. And listen to what we had to say to the Bank of America head. We're actually doing a reduction for business and small businesses where you're going to bring it down to 15%, which is really something. And by the way, speaking of you and you've done a fantastic job, but I hope you start opening your bank to conservatives because many conservatives complained that the banks are not allowing them to do business within the bank, and that included a place called Bank of America. They don't take conservative business,

and I don't know if the regulators mandated that because of Biden or what, but you and Jamie and everybody, I hope you're going to open your banks to conservatives because what you're doing is wrong. Mr. President, I'll say that your friend Gianni said hello, told me to tell you hello, and we look forward to sponsoring the World Cup when it comes. But it's this summer for the club and next year, so thank you for getting that for the United States.

Talk about a diversion. Okay. Can we talk about soccer? Yeah. And more on soccer. I'll share a beer with you at the World Cup. We'll talk about that later. Not here.

Right. But, you know, that used to be, hey, it's a conspiracy theory. No one's getting deep banks, especially if you're conservative. We love everybody. But in 2021, we saw these headlines starting. Calls for Bank of America boycott grow after data given to FBI. So what they were doing was giving this data, the customer data, and this isn't just a headline from some article. This is actually a report in 2024.

The House published a report. New report exposes massive government surveillance of Americans' financial data. And it says in this report, federal law enforcement, including the Treasury Department's financial crimes enforcement network and the FBI facilitated multiple back-channel discussions with financial institutions to gather Americans' private financial information. They go on and say these discussions involve some of the large. financial institutions in the United States, such as Barclays, U.S. Bank, Charles Schwab, H.S.B.C., Bank of America, and PayPal, and many others. The surveillance extended beyond criminal suspicion, likely encompassing millions of Americans with conservative viewpoints or Second Amendment interests.

And this has brought about 15 AGs have put Bank of America on notice for debanking conservatives. And what did Bank of America do after Trump made that statement at Davos? They took to X, the popular social media platform and tried to really just level with the people. And they posted this on their account. They said, we welcome conservatives, they say. We would never close accounts for political reasons and don't have a political litmus test. Well, a couple of people had something to say about that instantly, which is the beauty of social media. People can go right back as big business.

So we have Eric Prince. He was a former Navy SEAL. And he says this. He says, this is a complete lie. You deep, this just give the idea how far this goes. You debanked me, my children, stepchildren, and hell. You even debanked my wife and her new husband because their account received child support payments from me. Fix yourself and clear out your illegal discriminatory banking practices.

It goes on. Then we have former Breitbart reporter Jennifer Lawrence. She says, well, she says a couple swear words there, but I'll pick it up here. She says, you took my bank account away as well as my mother's, my husband's account in 2021 for political reasons and placed us on a pep list. I have evidence to prove it. STFU and shove your corporate board, you know where. Boycott, Bank of America. And finally, these are just three.

You can go all day with these. Constitutional Law Professor, very respected. John Eastman, he says, so why Pratel Bank of America? Did you cancel my and my wife's accounts after I have been a customer for nearly 40 years? And why did you refuse to tell me why? Here's the cancellation

letter. So these practices clearly were out of control. I mean, we're talking like Stasi Germany-style level debanking at this point. Wow. Yeah, amazing. Amazing. And that is the beauty of social media and why it was so scary when you had Biden administration. And then ultimately, Kamala Harris promising to end, you know, end free speech on, you know, we got to stop the misinformation. So if the government's owned by the banks, the governments owned by the pharmaceutical industry, we would not be allowed

to post things like that. This is, you know, why I think we're in a really huge, huge transitional moment while we're watching these hearings and things taking place. Right. And when we go pull out even further from the umbrella of control with banking, we have the central bank digital currencies we talked about before. And this sends everything. It's not just one bank, a couple million customers because the FBI wants the data. This is everyone's data all the time every day, every night, through the central authority. And you can be turned off with a flip of a switch. And this, President Trump has signed an executive order to end the United States work on the central bank digital currency.

Wow. We can see this here, and it's titled Strengthen American Leadership, Trump banned CBDC Task Force, but he also goes into cryptocurrency. So you can read that here, this executive order. He's looking to create a Bitcoin stockpile. There's a lot of conversation on that. But I want to go into... And just very quickly for people that may be a brand new, the CBDC is a central bank digital currency. A lot of the concerns around that is now the money is basically being tracked by the government.

There's even thoughts that they could, you know, in a way like tattoo your money with what it can be allocated towards. If they decide to go carving credits, you could find suddenly you cannot buy a stake at the restaurant. Some alarm comes up, you know, going through, you've already had three stakes. We think that you're causing global warming. I mean, that's just one of the examples. Or you try to give your, you know, money to a nonprofit like ours. That is, you know, suing the government in the United States, which is something we've been very effective at. All of a sudden, your money's not allowed to do that, right?

The currency has already got it written in there in the sort of digital code that you don't see things your money is allowed to do. It doesn't matter that you made it anymore. Now they're controlling what you can do with it. Very, very scary future. I mean, basically, it's like going to prison. We're in prison now.