Debankings

For reasons you can guess at, debanking has been the topic du jour in my Twitter feed.

I will only report the following.  On this last Friday, both Alex and I (coincidentally) each wanted to send money through the U.S. banking system.  For each of us it was a major pain, and for no good substantive reason.  I do understand why the relevant constraints are there, but at some point “justification” is no longer enough.  People have to actually want to use the system.  And the U.S. banking system — referring to that notion narrowly — is increasingly unattractive.  It is also failing various market tests, if you look at its relative import over time.

How innovative is it?  How good is it with software?  How international is it in scope and potential usage?  How necessary is it for lending?  Can it integrate with crypto?  Why does service quality at my local bank continue to decline?  Relative performance is sliding, there is no other way to put it.

Yonas is in fact not a terrorist, and he did eventually get his money, after considerable frustration on my part and probably on his as well.

Ths status quo, relative to alternatives, likely will get worse as the pace of innovation increases.  So rather than defend debankings, a better tack is to tell us how you will fix the problems you have created with the status quo.  Debankings are simply the canary in the coal mine, no matter what percentage of them you may think are justified, or not.

John Arnold has some good tweets on the topic, start here.  Here is Dennis Porter.