Image of the Day

laundering money for—through Iran. This, again, comes on the heels of
the Libor scandal, which has already caught up two major British banks—
the Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays. So, you have essentially all of
the major British banks now are inveigled in these enormous scandals. We
have a couple of arrests, you know, today involving low-level people in
the Libor thing, but it doesn’t look like any major players are going to be
indicted criminally for any of this.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And this whole argument that the bank is too
big to indict because of the threat to the world financial system, most
people don’t know thatHSBC stands for Hong Kong and Shanghai
Banking Corporation. It’s a British bank that goes back to the early days of
British colonialism in Asia.
MATT TAIBBI: Sure.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And is it too big to be indicted?
MATT TAIBBI: The amazing thing about that rationale is that it’s
exactly the opposite of the truth. The message that this sends to everybody,
when banks commit crimes and nobody is punished for it, is that you can
do it again. You know, if there’s no criminal penalty for committing even
the most obvious kinds of crimes, that tells everybody, investors all over
the world, that the banking system is inherently unsafe. And so, the
message is, this is not a move to preserve the banking system at all. In
fact, it’s incredibly destructive. It undermines the entire world confidence
in the banking system. It’s an incredible decision that, again, is met with
surprise even with—by people in the financial community.
AMY GOODMAN: On Tuesday, Thomas Curry, head of the Office
of the Comptroller of the Currency, the lead regulator for HSBC in the
U.S., defended the settlement.
THOMAS CURRY: These actions send a strong message to the
bank and to the financial services industry to make compliance with the
law a priority to safeguard their institutions from being misused in ways
that threaten American lives.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Thomas Curry, head of the Office of the
Comptroller of the Currency. It seems like a lot of people who are in
prison right now—low-level thieves, criminals, drug launderers, people