A Handy Guide on Where to Bank

29 thoughts on “A Handy Guide on Where to Bank”

1. This is retrenchment for when they lose the fight for anti gun laws. If nobody will do business with gun makers, it won’t matter what the laws are.

   1. I for one would welcome paying cash for guns. Would love to hear it from the abti-gunners on that one too. Talk about unintended consequences.

      My banking (including my primary use CC offering 3% cash back) is primarily done at a credit union for many reasons. I don’t regret my decision.

      1. The problem isn’t on the consumer end. They are striking at manufacturers, distributors and retailers all of whom need credit to operate.

         1. No, the problem is very much in the consumer end mostly. Financial, you ready can’t discriminate against servicing lawful businesses for the reasons you describe. You would be able to go for injunctive relief at some point in that case once it becomes egregious enough.

            RICHARD!!! RICHARD!!! (Sorry couldn’t resist)

            1. You think that judges follow the law. How quaint.

               1. It seems to me either they follow the law of the land or law of the gun. They take their pick. Kind of like ballot box or powder box.

2. Oh this is great! My personal bank is PNC, while my big credit cards are Chase.

   But this does highlight something we need from Congress, or even state legislatures: protection for gun business against this restraint of legal trade.

   1. You sound like a liberal. We don’t need legislation, if banks behave poorly then the invisible hand will take care of things.

      1. LOL!! No I prefer no legislation but that is not the reality we live in.

      2. I think that’s a self-defeating attitude.

         In the world that you and I would both prefer, the invisible hand would take care of things. In the actual world that we live in, the anti-gun left is using its political and cultural juice to advance its agenda, and there’s no neutral referee coming to our rescue.

         You’re not going to be able to jawbone these people into playing nice. They’re not going to wake up one morning having come to the realization that what they’re doing is profoundly illiberal. They don’t care. They want you either dead or enslaved, the end.

         So as I see it, we have two choices:

         One, we can essentially volunteer to be Charlie Brown trying to kick the football, forever. The anti-gun left will continue to use its political and cultural juice to screw with us, and we’ll do nothing about it except whine ineffectually. They’ll continue to win while getting down on their knees every night to thank Gaia that we’re a bunch of gelded chumps.

         Two, we can use our own political and cultural juice to screw with them right back, tit-for-tat, and make this as godawfully painful as possible for them. At every turn we can offer them the chance to return to the Old Rules, under which this kind of thing was out of bounds, but we should unhesitatingly and mercilessly operate under the New Rules until such time as they cry uncle.

         I pick #2. YMMV.

         1. Perfect explanation of the situation BC.

            I don’t really want to do number 2. But I understand its necessary, for the reasons you laid out.

            The New Rules either apply to both sides or neither side. They cannot only apply to one side. I don’t think they’ll like the New Rules applied to them any more than we like it applied to us. But we need to make them feel the pain, so that we can all agree to go back to the Old Rules.

            1. Ace (at Ace of Spades HQ) makes this point a lot, and while I disagree with him about a lot of things I think he’s dead on the money here.

               I’m absolutely unwilling to abide a caste system in this country, where the left gets to say and do whatever illiberal things it wants, and I just have to sit there and take it, and never retaliate in kind even in defense of my own interests, because muh principles. If your principles obligate you to unilaterally and meekly submit to these jagoffs, then your principles suck and you need better ones.

               1. I wasn’t sure whether he forgot the sarc tag or whether it was a full blown case of libertarian dementia. But you are right about tit for tat being the only winning strategy.

3. Of the banks I do business with Chase, US Bank and Wells Fargo are all F’s.

   I also have a card with capitol one that I’m going to drop shortly. Since they got only a D maybe I should mention that as part of why I’m leaving …

4. I primarily bank with WF and Chase. Although I do have one account with BofA (C rated).

   When Citi went full-on gun control last year, I closed a high limit credit account that was open for 22 years and an investment account worth a significant dollar amount. They sent letter after letter after phone call and I let them know that I would re-establish account with them as soon as they fully retracted their statement. I’m not holding my breath.

   FYI – anyone with Home Depot cards is a Citi customer – I cancelled that too. Also, Cabelas card is backed by CapitolOne (D rated).

   1. I dropped my Cabelas card when the changeover happened last year; I don’t trust Capital One for many reasons.

   2. I closed my Citibank M/C which I had Adobe 1978 and I told them why. The customer service rep implies that I was not the first customer she had heard this from. And I am the customer every back wants: FICO 850.

5. They “F” BB&T but I had heard a while back that BB&T had gone Gun Free Zone. Anyone got the latest info?

   1. The branches around here do not have signs posted, but that may be because the signs have no force of law here.
      I used to have a loan with them, and closed my account when I paid off the loan since they kept charging me fees I didn’t owe.

6. Wells Fargo probably has an “F” not because they don’t support gun control, but because they’re so incompetent they’d fuck up a cup of coffee.

   1. Wells Fargo affirmatively told the gun grabbers to take a flying poke at a rolling donut.

      1. Still doesn’t mean they aren’t incompetent hacks. They certainly were back in the 80’s and 90’s. I opened an account to help my father do some of his business locally here on the west coast. Everything they touched they screwed up. It got expensive. Hadn’t even gotten the checks yet, and they cost me about $2k on an $8k boat sale. Then they lost a $12k wire sent to my dad’s bank to meet a loan deadline. Took them a week to figure out what they had done, and retrieve the money and get it to the account. Don’t recall what that cost him. There were other screwups I can’t recall now. The account agent was in tears by the time I finished detailing all the problems and the associated costs, when I closed the account. To add insult to injury, they bought my local bank I had used for twenty years. Sigh.

         1. That’s one of the problems I have with calls for buycotts and boycotts.

            In general, I’m not going to do business with a big bank. Period. I’ll take my business to a local bank or a credit union, one that generally treats their customers nicely.

            I can’t bring myself to open an account at a bank that isn’t nice to customers, even if they have good gun policies. I can’t boycott bad banks, because first and foremost, I *already* don’t trust these bad banks. They are bad enough, that gun policies aren’t even on the radar.

            This begs the question, though, of why the heck these banks even have enough business we can complain about their gun policies — they should have gone out of business a *long* time ago.

            Perhaps it’s just that they are only incompetent for a *handful* of customers, and those are all the stories we hear…or perhaps there’s a large segment of the population for whom big bank incompetence is either small enough that it doesn’t hurt them, much…or they have never bothered to see if better options are out there…

            I don’t know the answer. I just scratch my head and wonder….

            1. It’s a combination of a couple of things.

               The first is that consumer banking is only part of these banks’ business portfolios, and corporate customers, especially larger ones, enjoy concierge-style service that insulates them from a lot of the annoyances a typical consumer experiences.

               The second is that the only language a bank really understands is the loss of a customer, and the annoyances a typical consumer experiences are rarely severe enough to get them to go to the trouble of moving their banking to a competitor. This isn’t because the annoyances aren’t severe in absolute terms, but because moving your banking to a different bank is a huge pain in the ass.

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8. None of the banks I deal with are even on the list. As far as I know, they don’t have any issues with gun owners.

9. Where’s JOE!!! with all his visions of official oppression? I feel like I am missing the show on a thread in which his name does not appear. I popped popcorn and everything… and made all this paella.

   Any question posited on this blog can now be answered “because JOE!!!”

10. Happy to learn that my banking is with F-rated Chase!

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