Welcome to Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2026. Marty McFly arrived in the future 11 years ago today, and I'm still waiting on my hoverboard.

My calendar says it's Apple Day, Reptile Awareness Day, Pumpkin Cheesecake Day, Witch Hazel Day, Back to the Future Day, International Nacho Day, and Global Dignity Day. So load up on apples, nachos, and pumpkin cheesecake, dab a little witch hazel on whatever that causes, and fire up the DeLorean for a trip back to when a bank's biggest sin was losing your deposit slip. Leave the reptiles at home. There's only room for two.

Today in History:

1797: The frigate Constitution, later nicknamed "Old Ironsides," slid into Boston Harbor at her launch.
1805: Adm. Horatio Nelson's fleet crushed the French and Spanish at the Battle of Trafalgar, though a sniper's bullet killed Nelson in the moment of victory.
1879: Thomas Edison tested a carbon-filament light bulb that burned for more than 13 hours, paving the way for practical electric lighting.
1944: Allied troops captured Aachen, the first major German city to fall in World War II.
1945: Women in France voted in a national election for the first time.
1959: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened its doors in New York, inside Frank Lloyd Wright's spiraling design.
1960: John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon squared off in the fourth and final debate of their presidential race.
1966: A coal-waste tip collapsed onto the Welsh village of Aberfan, burying a school and killing 144 people, 116 of them children.
1967: Tens of thousands of antiwar protesters marched on the Pentagon.
1971: President Richard Nixon nominated Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court.
1976: The Swedish Academy awarded Saul Bellow the Nobel Prize in Literature.
1980: The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Kansas City Royals to win their first World Series.

Birthdays Today include: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet ("The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Kubla Khan"); Alfred Nobel, chemist and inventor (dynamite, the Nobel Prizes); Dizzy Gillespie, jazz trumpeter ("A Night in Tunisia"); Whitey Ford, Hall of Fame pitcher (New York Yankees); Ursula K. Le Guin, author (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness); Manfred Mann, keyboardist and bandleader ("Do Wah Diddy Diddy," "Blinded by the Light"); Steve Cropper, guitarist and songwriter ("Green Onions," "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay"); Judy Sheindlin, TV judge (Judge Judy); Lee Loughnane, trumpeter (Chicago); Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister; Carrie Fisher, actress and author (Star Wars, Postcards from the Edge); Ken Watanabe, actor (The Last Samurai, Inception); Kim Kardashian, reality TV personality (Keeping Up with the Kardashians).

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If today's your birthday too, happy birthday. Celebrate with nachos, and save the dynamite for Alfred.

* * *

After being on a much-needed vacation for the last several days, I find I have much to catch up on. I finally ran into this story in my backlog:

Bank of America can find you if you swiped your debit card in Washington on the wrong day in January 2021. It can find you if your politics carry a whiff of “reputation risk.” What it apparently couldn’t find was $5 billion in suspicious transactions, Chinese money-laundering networks, and a few hundred sanctions violations involving Iran and Russia.

That oversight just cost the bank more than $1.2 billion. Pardon me while I search for my tiny violin. I seem to have misplaced it, much like Bank of America misplaced its compliance department.

On October 13, the Treasury Department dropped the hammer: a $1.2 billion FinCEN penalty, a $750 million civil penalty from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency credited toward it, and an $11.6 million settlement with the Office of Foreign Assets Control over 475 apparent sanctions violations. All told, roughly $1.21 billion.

The OCC penalty set a record for that agency. The overall package ranks as the third-largest in Treasury history, behind only Binance and TD Bank. That’s the company Bank of America keeps now: a crypto exchange and a Canadian bank that became a cartel’s favorite piggy bank.

That’s not a parking ticket. You don’t stumble into a billion-dollar fine by fat-fingering a spreadsheet.

So what did they do to deserve this? The bank admitted to willfully violating the Bank Secrecy Act. Willfully. Not “inadvertently,” not “due to a regrettable software glitch.” The bank sat on reports of more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions instead of filing them on time. FinCEN said the bank failed to flag activity tied to national security threats, including Chinese money-laundering networks and illicit finance along the southwest border.

The OCC, meanwhile, found that the bank’s monitoring system failed to properly screen trillions of dollars in transactions. Uh, that's trillions. With a T. The sanctions side involved programs targeting Iran, Russia, narcotics trafficking, and global terrorism. That’s a list a compliance department ought to know by heart.

And the best part? The bank had already been warned. The OCC slapped Bank of America with a cease-and-desist order, back in December 2024. More than a year later, regulators said, the breakdowns continued. Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould didn’t mince words: “The bank’s poor response to its BSA deficiencies is unacceptable.” When your regulator uses the word “unacceptable” in a press release, you’ve moved well past a gentle nudge.

Bank of America didn’t even fight it. Its statement said financial crime compliance is serious and the bank is “responsible for getting it right.” Pity nobody mentioned that before the cease-and-desist order. Or after it. It occurs to me that you generally don’t see that kind of admission without some fear of what’s hidden underneath that admission, being investigated further. Pay the government off and maybe they'll shut up about it.  

The conclusion here seems inescapable. Bank of America’s surveillance machinery works fine. It just points in the wrong direction. But at whose behest?

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After Jan. 6, 2021, according to whistleblower testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, the bank handed the FBI a list of every customer who used a BofA credit or debit card in the Washington area from Jan. 5-7. No warrant. No subpoena. Retired FBI analyst George Hill testified that the bank “data-mined its customer base” with no (publicly acknowledged) directive from the bureau. Bought a sandwich near the Mall that week? Congratulations, you made the list. Or, as I wrote yesterday, a few buyers of red hats made that list, as well 

So when the bank wanted to find people who might be Trump supporters, it found them in a hurry. It didn’t need a court order. It didn’t even need to be asked. Chinese money launderers moving billions? Hmm, that one’s tricky.

Then there’s debanking. The same OCC that just fined Bank of America has released a report on the nine largest national banks, Bank of America included. It found that all nine had broad “reputation risk” policies between 2020 and September 2025 that disadvantaged Americans based on their political, religious, or social views. Gould called it “irrefutable evidence” that the nation’s largest banks denied and discriminated against customers and lawful businesses, but ones Democrats disapprove of.

So let’s tally up the scoreboard:

To be fair, (and I suppose somebody has to be) the money-laundering penalty and the debanking findings are separate cases. Nobody has shown the bank skipped the cartel paperwork because it was busy hunting conservatives. But the contrast tells you everything about priorities. Bank of America built a compliance apparatus with enough horsepower to sweep its customer base for the politically inconvenient. Somehow that same apparatus couldn’t manage the one job the law actually requires of it.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the penalty shows that even the biggest financial institutions aren’t above the law. Fine sentiment. I’ll believe it when the next bank caught sending a customer list to the FBI without a warrant gets the same treatment as the one caught waving through cartel money. And notice who was dominating both houses of Congress and the White House as well when these misdeeds were committed.

The rules ought to apply equally, regardless of your politics, your bank balance, or how many lobbyists you keep on retainer. If a bank can spot a conservative from a mile off, it can spot a suspicious wire transfer. If it can’t, it’s either incompetent or it’s choosing what to see. Neither one is a great look for the second-largest bank in America.

Bank of America just paid $1.2 billion to learn that lesson. Or did they learn it at all? Something tells me the bank will go on finding exactly what it wants to find. Particularly if the midterm elections take the heat off of them.

Thought for the Day: A bank that can find your coffee purchase but not a cartel's wire transfer isn't blind. It's choosing where to look.

VIP members: Let’s hear your thoughts. Your voice matters.

Take care, gang. I’ll see you here tomorrow.