Largest US Banks Boycott Lending To Oil, Gas Sector, Put Millions Of Jobs At Risk - WSJ

Largest US Banks Boycott Lending to Oil, Gas Sector, Put Millions of Jobs at Risk - WSJ

The largest financial institutions in the United States are withholding lending from oil and gas companies that are succumbing to pressure by environmental activists, thereby putting millions of jobs in the country at risk, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Wednesday

MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 15th July, 2020) The largest financial institutions in the United States are withholding lending from oil and gas companies that are succumbing to pressure by environmental activists, thereby putting millions of jobs in the country at risk, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Wednesday.

According to the newspaper, usually, financial institutions have to compete to land corporate customers, guaranteeing that the best projects might gain capital and use it to provide customers with quality products at reasonable prices. However, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo began cutting off liquidity and capital to the US energy sector, promising to even stop lending money for Arctic oil drilling and coal mining.

The WSJ stated that BlackRock, the world's largest investment firm, announced in January that it would stop investing in companies that receive more than 25 percent of their revenue from thermal coal. The newspaper said that such announcements looked like proposals to collude in a boycott of a critical segment of the US economy and might violate the country's antitrust legislation.

The WSJ stressed that a situation in which the US financial sector bans the energy sector from obtaining capital cannot be considered to be fair competition on the free market.