After a global financial crisis, an epic price fixing scandal, and embarrassing criminal conduct British regulators are considering ending Too Big To Fail Banking. British Finance Minister George Osborne has proposed legislation that if banks do not shield their riskier investment activities from day to day banking they will face restructuring. Britain is shaking up [...]

We now have bipartisan anger at the decision to hold HSBC and its executives harmlessfor years of money laundering and facilitating the culture of Mexican drug cartels. In fact, only the shareholders will pay, and not all that much, what amounts to five weeks’ worth of profits for the bank. The certainty of not being [...]

It would be irresponsible for me to say that Felix Salmon probably cashed a nice check from the banking industry when he produced this defense of the US declining to prosecute HSBC for money laundering. I think a couple elements of his piece wind up being self-negating, so I don’t have to do much work. [...]

Maybe I was too blasé about the federal government letting HSBC off the hook; certainly the story has effectively shown how Too Big to Fail continues to be the watchword of the financial regulatory community. My pet theory here is actually that, because practically every mega-bank engaged in this same type of money laundering for [...]

Yesterday was “bust British banks for money laundering” day in America, if you didn’t know.

Several weeks back, Standard Chartered Bank, caught engaging in multiple acts of money laundering, settled with the New York Department of Financial Services for $340 million. At the time I wrote that if the Treasury Department and the other federal regulators cannot get as much from Standard Chartered as the DFS, “it will be completely [...]

I think what we’ve learned by now is that every international bank in the world may have violated US anti-money laundering guidelines, specifically when it came to doing business with countries barred by sanctions. Royal Bank of Scotland is only the latest, and you can add it to the growing list of firms we know [...]

Benjamin Lawsky’s impertinent insistence that Standard Chartered Bank actually did something wrong when it facilitated $250 billion in money laundering has really scrambled the federal regulatory response to similar charges. Because the dirty secret is that practically EVERY big bank may have engaged in similar behavior. And now the regulators, embarrassed into action by Lawsky, [...]

Standard Chartered Bank avoided a contentious Wednesday hearing that could have led to the revocation of their ability to do business in the state of New York, by reaching a settlement with the state Department of Financial Services for $340 million over widespread money laundering charges. This is a bit less than some of the [...]

After flirting with a countersuit, Standard Chartered Bank is slowly coming around to the deal offered them by New York’s Department of Financial Services in a money-laundering scandal. The bank has agreed to an outside monitor that would oversee compliance with state and federal anti-money laundering laws. This is a prelude to agreeing to an [...]

This Standard Chartered Bank story has become really intriguing, mainly because New York Department of Financial Services head Benjamin Lawsky committed the unpardonable sin of doing his job. The story so far: this week, the DFS cited Standard Chartered with $250 billion in illegal money-laundered transactions with the government of Iran. It’s only the latest [...]