A Big-Government Crackdown on ‘Woke Capital’
National Review cites Senior Fellow John Berlau on the OCC proposed Rule on “Fair Access to Financial Services”:
There’s also the matter of how hard this regulation would be to enforce in practice. Currently, some banks are openly refusing to finance endeavors they think are socially harmful, and that would certainly end. But discrimination need not be so blatant. As John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute puts it:
In many cases, bank officials could have a low personal opinion of an industry as well as valid business reasons for denying a loan to a specific firm. . . . In the case of an abortion clinic, does the OCC query whether any of the bank’s employees or directors were members of pro-life groups? In the case of a loan rejection for a socialist website, do OCC regulators look at whether bank personnel donated to conservative or libertarian think tanks?