Six global banks, two them British, have just been fined £5.6bn in what the FBI has called ‘massive scale’ criminality, yet no individual executive has been prosecuted and no bank has been deprived of its licence to practise which would have happened in any other sector given such monumental wrongdoing. Indeed State regulators have gone out of their way to protect them from any such consequences. None of the charges in respect of any of the banks has been brought to trial so that the full scale and nature of these criminal activities will never be publicly disclosed. Two of the banks did not admit to any crimes related to this abuse, though they still paid up, but the other 4 who did were then given waivers shielding them from the consequences that would normally follow – the loss of the all-important banking licence. The banks have an armlock around the neck of the State. Continue reading
Tagged with Regulation
Hound of Hounslow shows non-regulation of banks remains extremely dangerous
No-one had heard of Navinder Singh Sarao until on 6 May 2010 he ‘spoofed’ the international stock markets while sitting in his room in his parents’ semi in Hounslow and made $879,000 on that day alone and, it is alleged, $40 millions fraudulently over 5 years. He is now awaiting extradition to the US to face charges. But the crucial points are that one lone individual (though his connections with several big names in finance have been noted) could generate a ‘flash crash’ causing a loss of £1 trillion of stock market value albeit very temporary) and what damage might be done by market operators with bigger financial resources. Continue reading
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Why isn’t HSBC being prosecuted?
The differential treatment between those low-paid workers who fraudulently claim benefits and those top bank executives who launder hundreds of millions of pounds for drug cartels or pariah states tells you all you need to know about the class basis of justice in the UK. A person claiming benefits while working can get up to a year in prison with all the shame involved, yet the bank director responsible for HSBC Mexico, which handled a colossal $376bn of suspect money for the US bank Wachovia, gets off scot-free and is even, in flagrant disregard for the law, promoted to become head of HSBC global retail on a multi-million dollar salary. There could not be a more blatant example of one law for the poor and quite another one for the rich. Continue reading
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Why media conglomerates should be broken up
The hacking trials aren’t even half the issue. The hard, unavoidable fact remains that the power of the Murdoch press – the real unspoken stain behind the Brooks-Coulson trials – is undiminished and has still not been broken. It is best illustrated by the run-up of events to the long-planned Murdoch campaign to take over BSkyB, a scheme that would have added some £8bn to the Murdoch empire as well as giving him a virtual stranglehold over the British media.
It began with Murdoch’s calculation in 2009 that a switch of the Sun to the Tories would make them indebted to him – perhaps even outlined in an informal deal – over his BSkyB objective. The game plan then began with James Murdoch meeting Cameron at a hotel in London in September 2009 to tell him that the Sun was switching sides. Continue reading
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Official: the banks are the new enemy within
One couldn’t put it better: ‘Some prominent firms/banks have been mired in scandals that violate the most basic ethical norms’. ‘Unchecked market fundamentalism can devour the essential social capital’. ‘A fierce industry push-back by the banks’ is blocking much-needed reforms and risks destabilising the global economy.
When the high priests of capitalism at the IMF and Bank of England have become so desperate at the waywardness of their flock as to be preaching so defiantly the message of the Left, it might seem that real reform is finally in the air. Especially when regulators internationally (mainly in the US, not much in the UK) have already imposed penalties of $5.8bn for attempts to manipulate market benchmark rates. Continue reading
