In this year’s annual reports to shareholders, America’s largest banks proclaimed their allegiance to climate activism, racial equity, and other progressive causes, spending billions in shareholders’ money to support this agenda.
Similar in vein to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s
annual letter, which often pushed other CEOs to get in line with initiatives like renewable energy, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s most recent
letter to shareholders declared: “The window for action to avert the costliest impacts of global climate change is closing.” Dimon called for governments, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations to unite behind a “massive global investment in clean energy technologies.”
“We may even need to evoke eminent domain,” he writes, taking other people’s property where permitting issues or local resistance gets in the way.
JPMorgan Chase is America’s largest bank, followed by Bank of America, Citibank, and Wells Fargo.
Regarding social justice, Dimon said the bank spent $30 billion on its racial-equity commitment, which includes preferential treatment of “Black, Hispanic, and Latino” suppliers, homeowners, and small-business owners.
Dimon ventured into politics by writing that “we need to find a way to more rapidly reorganize our government for the new world,” calling for the United States to embark on an industrial policy to foster industries vital to our national security, such as “batteries, rare earths, semiconductors, or EVs.” Industrial policy, he stated, means “the federal government, through incentives and policies, drives American industry.”
However, Dimon writes, “rest assured your CEO is a red-blooded, patriotic, free-enterprise, and free-market capitalist (properly regulated, of course).”
Similarly, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan’s
shareholder letter says the company operates according to the “Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics” developed by the World Economic Forum, which measure how well a company supports the United Nations
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Stakeholder capitalism means that CEOs prioritize the goals of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles, where previously they had focused primarily on enhancing shareholder returns.
Moynihan writes that a transition to “clean energy technologies … will require a significant investment; some estimates are as high as $275 trillion over the next 30 years.” Accordingly, the bank intends to “deploy $1.5 trillion in sustainable finance by 2030, $1 trillion of which is aligned to the environmental transition and $500 billion to inclusive social development.”
This includes a $2 billion Equality Progress Sustainability Bond, which Bank of America issued in 2022 “to help advance racial and gender equality, economic opportunity, and environmental sustainability.” Like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America also
provided financing to certain favored races on preferential terms.
Wells Fargo CEO Charles Scharf
reported that his company spent “$150 million to advance racial equity in homeownership, with an additional $100 million investment toward this racial equity effort announced in 2023,” and also launched a $60 million program to address systematic barriers to homeownership for people of color” that will create 40,000 new “homeowners of color” by 2025. Internally, Wells Fargo commissioned a racial equity assessment, which will report later this year on how well the bank is complying with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) criteria.
While the bank also announced a separate plan called Dream.Plan.Home to help homeowners based on their income, the bulk of its assistance efforts appeared to focus on skin color. In addition, Wells Fargo issued its second Inclusive Communities and Climate Bond, “a $2 billion bond that will finance projects and programs supporting housing affordability, economic opportunity, renewable energy, and clean transportation.”
Citibank CEO Jane Fraser’s
shareholder letter stated: “Our commitment to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion goes well beyond Citi’s walls,” and includes a $1 billion Action for Racial Equity initiative.
Citibank’s annual report states that it “became the first major U.S. bank to set a recruiting goal for LGBTQ+ candidates” and “set 2030 emissions reductions targets for energy and power lending portfolios as part of Citi’s net zero commitment.”
Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on March 29
green-lit a shareholder proposal to investigate an alleged “disturbing trend of politicized debanking” and discrimination against conservative and religious customers at JPMorgan Chase. The SEC allowed this proposal to go to a shareholder vote at the bank’s annual meeting in May over the objections of JPMorgan Chase’s management.
