From the FT's email alerts this morning:
HSBC is expected to pay $1.9bn and enter a deferred-prosecution agreement to settle accusations it allowed itself to be used by money launderers in Mexico and terrorist financiers in the Middle East, people familiar with the agreement said. US authorities won't indict HSBC " concerns that criminal charges could jeopardize one of the world's largest banks and ultimately destabilize the global financial system". However it will admit to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, the Trading with the Enemy Act and other US money laundering laws.
Meanwhile Standard Chartered has agreed to pay $327m to several US authorities to settle allegations it violated US sanctions law and impeded government inquiries, on top of the $340m it agreed to pay in August to New York state's Department of Financial Services.
And still we treat the top bankers who permitted this as useful members of society.
Why?
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..and why are expected to take their “analysis” on BBC News 24 seriously?
You know why, Richard. You’ve blogged and written about it enough, as has Nick Shaxson, John Lanchester, and many others. It’s the scale and scope of the power and influence of the banking and finance sector, of the City in particular, and all the organisations and people that provide ‘support’ functions – such as the big four accountancy firms. It’s effectively become one huge masonic lodge which so many people now aspire to become part of, if they aren’t born into it of course (as per Cameron, Osborne, Johnson, etc). And in a situation like that why would any of them take action against their own kind.
Because it’s their society, not ours. It’s an imposition model, it was introduced here by the Romans. It’s a top-down model, a handful of rulers control the rest of us through beaurocracy and force. Before that it seems to have been more horizontal, no capital that we know of (so far as I’m aware), no king, no state, and our relationship with the druids, though not clear, seems to have been one of the shepherded and the shepherd. The banks filled the position left empty by the departed Romans. They farm us for money, or rather they did when they could be bothered. They encourage us to trade, for which we have to turn to them for credit. They create credit which they can’t use themselves, they give it to us, we return it to them as money they can spend. Simples. The more we trade, the more we need credit from the banks so the more money the banks eventually get their hands on. They sow credit, they reap money. We are their farm. All the major political parties are happy to go along with this arrangement, lacking I suppose either the will to fight or the intellect, or both. Meanwhile the shortage of money created by the bankers theiving overtly from the rest of society leads otherwise social people to acts of desperation, theft, violence, in pursuit of survival and any reasonable quality of life. The way to fight (apart from burning the City of London to the ground, which may have to be done anyway) is to have councils use their taxes as a capital base and form local area banks. They can create money into their local communities interest-free to replace the artificial shortages caused by the bankers’ man Osborne, or at reasonable interest to be used for the benefit of the community, social services and so forth. Such money should be converted into local currencies a la Bristol Pound, stopping it from vanishing out of the area into tax havens. That should turn the tide back in the peoiple’s favour. If Osborne’s going to starve us of money we’ll just create our own and trade with that.