HSBC Bans Customers From Buying Bitcoin-Backer MicroStrategy Shares (reuters.com) 25
HSBC has banned customers of its online share-trading platform from buying or moving into their accounts MicroStrategy stock, calling it a "virtual currency product." Reuters reports: The bank will not facilitate the buying or exchange of products related to or referencing the performance of virtual currencies, the message to an HSBC InvestDirect client said. MicroStrategy declined to comment. The U.S. business software firm is led by bitcoin proponent Michael Saylor and owns bitcoin worth billions of dollars.
While HSBC will allow the holding, sale and outgoing transfer of MicroStrategy shares, it will forbid new purchases or incoming transfers, said the message dated March 29. "HSBC has no appetite for direct exposure to virtual currencies and limited appetite to facilitate products or securities that derive their value from VCs (virtual currencies)," HSBC said in a statement. The bank said its policy towards cryptocurrencies had been in place since 2018 and is kept under review.
While HSBC will allow the holding, sale and outgoing transfer of MicroStrategy shares, it will forbid new purchases or incoming transfers, said the message dated March 29. "HSBC has no appetite for direct exposure to virtual currencies and limited appetite to facilitate products or securities that derive their value from VCs (virtual currencies)," HSBC said in a statement. The bank said its policy towards cryptocurrencies had been in place since 2018 and is kept under review.
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Ah I've heard of this before, the idea that Bitcoin is really a store of energy. It has two big flaws, first that you can't convert Bitcoins directly into energy - you'd be paying for a second expenditure of energy from another external source, so it would be more like duplicating energy use than transferring it, spending energy now so that you can spend a second time later; and 2nd, that it's possible to spend BitCoins on things other than energy, a fact which utterly breaks the idea all by itself.
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HSBC eh? (Score:3)
HSBC eh? A bank that always pops up whenever there's money laundering and crossing millions over the border. They're mentioned in every dirty money investigation. I think they appeared a lot in the Panama Papers. They paid millions in fines for helping rich clients move money around.
Of course they would oppose crypto, which cuts the middleman.
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HSBC eh? A bank that always pops up whenever there's money laundering and crossing millions over the border. They're mentioned in every dirty money investigation. I think they appeared a lot in the Panama Papers. They paid millions in fines for helping rich clients move money around.
Of course they would oppose crypto, which cuts the middleman.
I was thinking the opposite. Given their proclivities for shady transactions I would have thought facilitating these transactions was right up their alley. For a small convenience fee of course.
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Sorry to pop your bubble, but cryptocurrencies are a drop in a bucket of the ocean of money being laundered by the big banks. It's such a huge business that Clinton's Treasury Secretary retired from "public service" to go run CitiCorp's "private banking" wing, and the CEO of the NY Stock Exchanged went to the jungles of Colombia to personally make a sales call on the FARC.
HSBC has several industries that they don't allow their customers to buy into, cryptocurrencies is just one of them.
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That's the problem. These banks need to LAUNDER money in order to get large sums across borders.
With crypto you don't need this. You only need to have a buyer and a seller at each end. MUCH cheaper, and the money stays "dirty", so no 10-20-30% cut from "laundering" it.
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Sure, you've moved it from one place to another but it's not been cleaned so it's still unusable and since the transaction record is propagated worldwide there's no covering its origin or its destination. It's just a money transfer, but without the advantage of banking anonymity. Drop ten million dollars in a Bank of Panama account and it can cascade through a dozen accounts in several countries and show up on the books of a shell company in the Bahamas half an hour later as $9,000,000 which can be paid b
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You don't get it. You only need to launder it if you intend to use it, like for investing abroad or buying a house. If you want to sit on it and keep under the radar, you can keep all your value in cash and move large sums around with BTC.
"Secret, anonymous bank accounts" are really hard to get an exclusive. A guy with "a couple million" can't get one. They're for very big fish...
You don't need to be ultra rich to move your money with BTC. Suppose you stole a couple million dollars and want to retire to a t
So what? Use a different financial institution (Score:1)
HSBC doesn't have a banking monopoly.
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They don't see there being any money in it for them?
The overlay chart is interesting (Score:2)
Overlay BTC and MSTR going back a year, and you see MSTR peaking in early February, then settling in to a bit of a range (although it's still volatile). BTC, OTOH, has continued to climb but not as aggressively and also has a flattening chart.
I don't know how much MSTR has borrowed to buy BTC, but if BTC goes down hard, leverage would cause MSTR to do even worse so the market might be pricing in that risk.
You know you're a wild and crazy CEO when the market prefers BTC to your company because it's regarded
WTF? (Score:2)
"HSBC has no appetite for direct exposure to virtual currencies"
Then it's a great thing that banks are not allowed to comingle their own funds with customer funds so this problem literally does not exist.
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Should banks be allowed to decide what I can buy? (Score:2)
Can a bank legally block a transaction just because they don't like it? I'm all for allowing private companies to do what they want, but I think banks should be neutral in this matter. Now, if there is a law blocking the purchase in the country that the account exists in, then I get it. What if some banks made decisions like "Let's block Netflix this month because they have gotten too big. I have a big investment in HBO Max so maybe this will force their stock to go up."
Or am I misunderstanding the arti