Debanking, and the Diss Heard Around Davos

ImageGood morning from Davos, Switzerland, on the final day of the World Economic Forum.The hottest chatter over the past 24 hours has been about two topics.

First, jaws were on the floor when President Trump, during a Q.and A.

session that included Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, claimed to Moynihan’s face that his institution had debanked conservatives.The bank is now scrambling to undo the damage.Second, the tech community here can’t stop talking about an A.I.

model by the Chinese start-up DeepSeek that is as powerful as ChatGPT and purportedly uses much less compute power.(We have more on both of these below.)And on a more personal note, a very unusual thing happened yesterday: A meme coin called “Sorkincoin” emerged after Larry Fink of BlackRock joked on CNBC that there should be one.

It appears some viewers created it — and the token has since topped $160 million in trading volume.Please know I have absolutely no affiliation with the coin in any way whatsoever.

— Andrew“Brian got whacked” For a few minutes at least, it seemed as though the air had been sucked out of the main auditorium on Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.President Trump had just dodged a softball question from Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan, and instead went after him, accusing the lending giant of routinely debanking many of his supporters, a hot-button issue among conservatives.“Brian got whacked,” was how one prominent executive described the frosty exchange to DealBook’s Lauren Hirsch.Replays of the presidential rebuke continued well into the night, especially over drinks.It didn’t seem to diminish the bullish mood that’s hung over Davos all week, as executives here celebrated Trump’s low-tax, low-regulation policy agenda.

But it was another reminder — as if business leaders needed one — that Trump has thrown out the old rules of engagement between Washington and C-suites.His blustery approach may lead to more deals and...