From the banks a trillion dollars to support the war industry
February 29, 2024
The "Finance for War. Finance for Peace" report reveals financing between 2020 and 2022
Between 2020 and 2022, the global financial sector invested at least $1 trillion to support arms production and trade.
Of this, almost half a trillion dollars, more than half of the estimated total investment in the sector, is provided by the United States, while 79 billion comes from the top ten European investors. The 15 largest European banks, however, invest in arms manufacturing companies for an amount equal to 87.72 billion euros. However, these figures are underestimated due to the lack of transparency in the sector.
These are frightening numbers documented by the "Finance for War. Finance for Peace" report which reconstructs and highlights the critical role of the global financial sector in facilitating military conflicts.
“This report aims to analyze the involvement of the financial sector in the production and trade of weapons used in large-scale conflicts, comparing the policies and practices of traditional banks with those of ethical, values-based banks ,” said Mauro Meggiolaro of Merian Research , a Berlin-based consultancy company that created the Report commissioned by Fondazione Finanza Etica and Gabv.

As mentioned, the numbers provided in the report are a conservative estimate of total global weapons financing. The report underlines how the information, although obtained from reliable and known sources, cannot be complete due to the difficulties in obtaining data also due to the lack of transparency in this field.
In fact, there is no official database that collects all the investments, loans and services of global financial institutions in the arms industry.