Top Tweets for #Exonomy

Trump is about to lock 157 million Americans out of their own bank accounts. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed an executive order forcing every US bank to collect proof of citizenship is "in process." And he just doubled down: "If Treasury and the banking regulators say it's their job, it's their job." This sounds irrelevant but here's what this really means: Per the Congressional Research Service, only 48% of Americans hold a US passport. That leaves over 170 million Americans without one. REAL IDs don't count. Driver's licenses don't count. Social Security cards don't count. Per Wall Street Journal reporting, banks will need a passport or birth certificate. The Brennan Center found 21.3 million voting-age US citizens don't have documents proving their citizenship easily available. These are Americans who are about to lose access to their own bank accounts. And here's the thing: The order applies to new AND existing customers. Banks could be forced to close accounts of people who can't produce documents. Your 78-year-old grandmother born at home in 1948. Your naturalized dad who lost his papers 30 years ago. Your cousin mid-passport renewal. The official story is that this stops illegal immigrants from accessing banking. But the actual reality: Illegal immigrants can't open US bank accounts anyway. Know Your Customer rules already require SSNs or ITINs. The existing system ALREADY blocks what this order claims to block. So who does this actually target? The half of Americans without a passport. Rural Americans. Elderly Americans born before centralized record-keeping. Black Americans in Southern states where birth records were historically unreliable. Low-income Americans who can't afford $225 for an expedited passport. The American Action Forum, a center-right think tank, estimates this adds 33 to 73 million paperwork hours and $2.6 to $5.6 billion in compliance costs. Guess who pays those costs? You do. Through fees. Through closed accounts. Through denied loans. Bessent's defense quote: "I have a place in the UK, they want to know who lives in every apartment." Bessent's net worth: $600 million. He has a "place in the UK." He will not be affected by this. So this isn't really about immigration. For the first time in American history, access to the banking system would be conditioned on proving citizenship to the federal government. That creates a permanent database linking every American's finances to their citizenship status. Once that database exists, it gets used by ICE, voting enforcement, tax enforcement, Social Security, and future administrations for purposes nobody has announced yet. Every future government gets the keys to decide who has a bank account based on paperwork. And Wall Street's reaction tells you everything: Bank execs privately called it "unworkable" and "a complete nightmare." One researcher called it "a way to weaponize the banking system to achieve political ends." They're not pushing back because they love immigrants. They just KNOW the compliance costs are catastrophic and half their customers will walk. Tom Cotton also introduced a companion bill in March making it a federal crime for any unauthorized person to "open or maintain a US bank account." Maintain. Meaning existing accounts. These things are literally being drafted right now. I'm surprised that all of this went under the radar.