This is the Catery Daily podcast for Thursday, February 13th, 2025.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's hard to function in the modern world without a bank account.

Yet many disfavored groups have found it difficult to get or maintain bank accounts.

Federal regulators can strongly influence decisions by banks to serve or not serve

certain customers. As administrations change, who is disfavored by regulators could change as well.

Cato's Nick Anthony discusses how debanking works. Nick is any American entitled to a bank account?

No, that is not one of the rights we are afforded.

Banking, we should understand, is one of the most heavily regulated industries in America.

It is almost essential to function in modern society having a bank account. And it should be up to

individual institutions, whether or not they do business with you. And yet we don't seem to have that clear situation in the United States when it comes to banking.

That's exactly right.

And it's interesting because I'm glad you frame that as being within the case of banking.

So many other places, It's kind of considered common

sense or maybe a better way to describe that is it's just intuitive and it's something you don't

really consider. But with banking, we've had a problem as of late where banks have decided they want to stop doing business with either a certain

industry or a certain customer. And there's really been two types of responses to this. On one

hand, there's concerns about government pressure to cut off those decisions,

and that's wholly wrong because there the government is trying to decide how a business should operate.

But on the other hand, there's people taking issue with banks making private decisions about their own operations.

And in taking issue with this, they've responded with

proposing even more regulations on the banks, even more restrictions to say what they can and can't do.

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