Bank of America

Bank of America provides critical financial services that enable fossil fuel expansion, including lending, underwriting, and project financing for oil, gas, and coal operations. According to a 2023 report titled "Complicit: Bank of America, Human Rights, and Fossil Fuel Expansion," the bank's financing drives climate impacts and associated human rights violations. In February 2024, Bank of America weakened its energy policy, removing explicit bans on financing new coal mines, coal-fired power plants, and Arctic drilling projects that it had established two years prior. This reversal aligns with its departure from the "Equator Principles," a set of environmental and social risk management standards for project finance. The bank's continued provision of capital and advisory services to fossil fuel companies constitutes a foundational ancillary service to the industry.

Bank of America has paid approximately $88 billion in fines and settlements since 2000, according to ViolationTracker, across 338 enforcement records. The single largest was a $16.65 billion settlement with the Department of Justice in 2014, the largest civil settlement with a single entity at that time, resolving federal and state claims against Bank of America and its subsidiaries Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch for systematic fraud in the origination and sale of residential mortgage-backed securities. The bank admitted that it knew many of the loans were defective and that it failed to disclose those defects to investors. Of the $16.65 billion, $9.65 billion went to federal and state entities and $7 billion funded consumer relief for borrowers harmed by the crisis.

The misconduct did not end with the mortgage era. In 2023, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ordered Bank of America to pay $250 million — $150 million in fines and $100 million in customer refunds — for systematically double-charging overdraft fees on the same transactions, opening credit card accounts without customer authorization, and withholding promised rewards. The OCC separately assessed a $60 million civil money penalty for the overdraft violations alone.