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by suetoniusp91 1195 days ago
Your point about banks being forced to do what governments cannot is a stretch. Your comparing a thrird party (governments) to a first party (banks). Your drug dealer knows your an addict well before your parents do. Also as another poster said banks get warnings to respond.

You can miss me with this banks are the victim. It has been shown over and over and over from the dawn of Banking that no matter who you are if you have a lot of money there is a bank willing to work with you.

Whether banks should be allowed to do this is a different question but they are absolutely not victims.

1 comments

> if you have a lot of money there is a bank willing to work with you

That's how people think it works but it's actually not the case, and one of the reasons why SVB ended in disaster. Read those threads and you'll see complaints that SVB was the only bank that "understood" startups, because they appear out of nowhere with millions of dollars. The word "understand" is euphemism for "startups trigger AML filters" because if you show up with lots of money from a single source, that looks like it might be corruption or drug dealing to the automated systems banks use. And then individual bankers aren't allowed to override the checks because they might become corrupt, and it's not just their lives on the chopping block if that happens, it's their bosses lives too.

SVB was built from the start to bank this sort of clientele, so their AML software was configured to allow it, but this led to a huge over-weighting of startups in their depositor base which then led to massive influxes and outflows of capital that they didn't manage properly. Other banks don't have quite the same sort of instability in their depositor base.