Sometimes, we are governed by considerations that fly below the radar. Take de-risking, also known as de-banking. It "is the closure of people's or organizations' bank accounts by banks who perceive the account holders to pose a financial, legal, regulatory, or reputational risk to the bank." Ostensibly, its chief use is to keep money launderers and criminals out of banks. But "reputational risk" is an elastic term, and it is sometimes used to keep social undesirables out.
On occasion, de-risking takes on the appearance of snobbery. Take the Nigel Farage Coutts bank scandal. It "occurred in June 2023 when the private bank Coutts closed the account held by the British broadcaster and former politician Nigel Farage. NatWest, the owner of Coutts, initially claimed that he failed to meet the Coutts eligibility criteria of holding £1,000,000 or more in his account, following the expiry of his mortgage."
It was later revealed that Farage's account was closed in part as Coutts felt that his beliefs and values did not align with theirs. In an internal dossier, Coutts wrote that he "is at best seen as xenophobic and pandering to racists" and considered a "disingenuous grifter".
Farage's real offense was to be insufficiently woke. Keeping low-class interlopers out is a time-honored practice. The old-fashioned term for the practice of de-risking by excluding the riff-raff from the club was "keeping up the tone" of the establishment. Hence the word "toney," which the dictionary defines as "marked by an aristocratic or high-toned manner or style" when applied to a venue.
Despite the egalitarian pretensions of the age, it's still uncool to look and act strictly from hunger. There's a theory that Trump's real crime is against style. The ghastly MAGA hats, the vulgar speech, his alleged preference for women with big hair, etc., are offensive to people with a real or acquired aesthetic sensibility. Although this theory was proposed in jest, there may be something to it. The intellectual objections to DJT alone cannot explain the visceral almost atavistic revulsion by a certain class of people toward him, as if he were wearing a Rodney Dangerfield suit. An earlier generation might have expressed it like the Duke of Wellington, who memorably said of Napoleon that his hat might be "worth fifty thousand men, but he is not a gentleman".
But in fairness to Trump, neither is Hunter Biden, whose reputational damage to his father may go rather beyond the criminal accusations made so far, because his scandalous behavior indirectly suggests that Joe isn't much of a gentleman either. As Arthur Conan Doyle's immortal detective observed:
“My dear Watson, you as a medical man are continually gaining light as to the tendencies of a child by the study of the parents. Don't you see that the converse is equally valid. I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.”
Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”
That's a much more serious crime for Joe to be guilty of, one that can't be fixed. Speechwriters and good camera angles do not always make the man. As one British king observed: "I can make a lord, but only God can make a gentleman." This inability to amend our inner qualities goes to the heart of the problem with some forms of reputational de-risking or de-banking. The bad guys sometimes wear nice suits, and we let them in the door. The banks themselves are often suspected of being conduits for ill-gotten gains. If you're looking for the biggest criminals in the world, sometimes the best place to look is not in the seedier sections of Detroit but in the toniest parts of London.
Perhaps there's a lesson to be learned from the fact that the biggest swindle in recent years traveled not only beneath the banner of cool, but also the scroll of virtue. Sam Bankman-Fried was the poster boy for effective altruism. The convicted money launderer warned the world of the danger of near-termism and killer robots, but he forgot to mention that we should fear him. Danger is often in the last place we look. "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!"
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