Speaker 6
Coming up next on The World and Everything In It, the Monday Money Beat.
Speaker 1
Time now to talk business markets and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bonson. David heads up the wealth management firm, The Bonson Group, and he is here now. David, good morning to you.
Speaker 2
Well, good morning, Nick. Good to be with you. David,
Speaker 1
hey, let's begin with Davos. The World Economic Forum President Trump made an appearance over Zoom, not in person, but he did manage to make quite a splash, telling the CEO of Bank of America to stop debanking conservatives. This is something that we've talked about here and the efforts that you have made, David, to open up corporate America to conservatives and Christians. And let's now hear a bit of what President Trump said. You've
Speaker 2
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
Speaker 1
of America put a statement out 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. 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 both this summer for the club and next year. So thank you for getting that for the United States. But again, this issue, David, near and dear to you.
Speaker 2
Well, you know, it's a really good talking point for the right because there were so many bad things that did happen. And it's in the banking sector. It was in the tech sector. There were a lot of these culturally discriminatory, you know, incidents of a number of years ago. And 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 full policies over the payment process where they own WePay, that was really explicitly ready to debank people. And J.P. Morgan changed there. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan, has probably been a leader in this front of just 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 OK, it happened. They're saying, yeah, it's not supposed to be happening. 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 then the mainstream press highlighting the victories that have been achieved, it's a good moment and one that should give a lot of, let's say, 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.