Moneybeat: Corporate neutrality wins

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It, the Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Time now to talk business, markets, and the economy with financial analyst and adviser David Bahnsen. David heads up the wealth management firm The Bahnsen Group. He is here now. Good morning to you, David.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Well, good morning, Nick. Good to be with you.

EICHER: Let’s begin with Davos: The World Economic Forum. President Trump made an appearance over Zoom, not in person. But he did make a splash, telling the CEO of Bank of America to stop de-banking conservatives, something we’ve talked about here and the efforts you’ve made to open up corporate America to conservatives and Christians. Let’s hear a bit of what President Trump said.

TRUMP: You've done a fantastic job, but I hope you start opening your bank to conservatives because many conservatives complain that the banks are not allowing them to do business within the bank, and that included a place called Bank of America. They don't take conservative business and I don't know if the regulators mandated that because of Biden or what, but you and Jamie and everybody I hope you're going to open your banks to conservatives because what you're doing is wrong.

Bank of America put out a statement later basically denying they do that. In the moment, though, CEO Brian Moynihan didn’t really engage with what the president said, but certainly didn’t contradict.

MOYNIHAN: Mr. President, I'll say that your friend Gianni said hello, told me to tell you hello, and we look forward to sponsoring the World Cup when it comes this summer for the club and next year, so thank you for getting that for the United States.

EICHER: But again, this is an issue near and dear to you, David.

BAHNSEN: Well, you know, it's a really good talking point for the right because there were so many bad things that did happen. It's in the banking sector. It was in the tech sector. There were a lot of these culturally discriminatory incidents a number of years ago. I think President Trump using that platform to push back against it, draws attention to some things.

Now, The Wall Street Journal ran a big feature story over the weekend that highlighted some of our efforts and the success we've had with JP Morgan, where so much of these things that had been happening were reversed, where they changed their policies over the payment processor they own, WePay, that was really, you know, explicitly ready to debank people—and JP Morgan changed there.

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan, has been a leader in this front of publicly putting the bank's reputation on the line saying, “Not only do we deny it's happened, but we're very, very adamant, we're not going to let it happen.” And that's the angle you want, because then when incidents do come up, they're not going to defend it as saying, “Oh, it's okay it happened.” They're saying, “Yeah, it's not supposed to be happening.”

We saw Pepsi on Thursday of last week announced that they were putting language up in response to my resolution, that they would no longer have either a political or religious screen around some of the things that they are tolerating, supporting.

They're really getting very explicit in the ways that they're now advocating for a viewpoint neutrality, which is what we've been asking for when it comes to the way they behave as an organization.

So it was a really good week in a lot of these ways. Big victories that some of us have been working on for a number of years.

I don't want to suggest, Nick, that it's over. I don't think that the work is done, but I do think that President Trump putting a microphone on some of it, and the mainstream press highlighting the victories that have been achieved, it's a good moment. It’s one that should give an opportunity for those that sometimes become despondent and believe we've lost these things. I think it's important that Christians stay encouraged that if you keep doing the right thing the right way, good things can happen.

EICHER: My colleague Onize Oduah is working on a story about the BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa—and one specific question she had was whether you think the five-nation bloc poses any kind of threat to the dominance of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. Is there much to that?

BAHNSEN: No, I think that it's really important that people stop worrying about what other currencies are doing and worry about what we're doing.

There is no possible way that a third-world country that doesn't allow capital in and out of its country, sometimes doesn't allow people in and out of its country, is ever a threat to the reserve status of the dollar.

The only issue that comes up is when we misbehave with our own currency. It has absolutely nothing to do with other currencies. The idea of the dollar being threatened by 0.002% of oil being denominated in another currency is a huge misnomer.

Now Trump doesn't care about currency very much himself, but he does care about the headlines around it looking like some countries are doing things that might push us down the ladder of importance.

That isn't happening here, but I think it's understandable he'd want to use the moment, I don't want to say cosmetically, but it's sort of symbolically he wants to maintain U.S. ascendancy on all fronts.

My only argument is the way in which our dollar remains the biggest and best currency in the world is for us not to use it for our own manipulative ends, for us to uphold rule of law and not use the currency as a weapon in that front. And if we do that, any conversation about a so-called BRICS currency is almost comical.

EICHER: We don’t have specific details nailed down yet, but we are committed to doing an online live event with David in February. We’ll talk with him more about the new administration, how he evaluates it, how he sees things shaping up. Once we set a date, we’ll let you know so you can be part of it if you’re interested in hearing more from David and maybe asking a question. So that’s to come. Be listening for details.

David Bahnsen, founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group. David writes at dividendcafe.com and regularly for WORLD Opinions. David, talk to you next week!

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick.

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