Ah, yet another financial institution avoids scrutiny and pays a fine, as Standard Chartered pays its $340 million bribe to continue operating in New York without subjecting itself to New York regulators and a hearing while the bank now announcing its intention to seek a sort of blanket deal to prevent future liability. “Negotiations are going on between the other agencies, and we are talking to them. It is safe to assume there will now be a collective agreement,” says a spokesman for the bank, but no time frame is currently being given.
The bank is still subject to investigations by the US Federal agencies and departments, so there are plenty of additional bribes to pay before they can continue operating as usual – the US Treasury and the Justice Department and supposedly the Fed (LOL, why to loot their vaults?) are subjecting the bank to investigation.
The settlement with the New York Department of Financial Services (“NYDFS”) stipulated that a “permanent” money-laundering monitor be installed in Standard Chartered’s New York branch while admitting it was at fault for up to $250 billion in transactions and not $14 million as Standard Chartered insisted.
Governor Cuomo, the governor of New York, hailed it as a victory: “This state and nation are still paying the price for a failed regulatory system and that must not happen again.”
In response, the bank’s stock has recovered a bit, rising 4.5% in London today, since falling harshly the prior week, with the stock falling as much as 20% in two days.
Story is HERE.
I’m starting to think that the regulatory agencies don’t have enough cash to pursue anything substantial against any of the bankers, but we’ll see. Out of all the NYDFS targets, this is interesting – perhaps they’re extracting money to go for something bigger later? A lot of the corrupt money, the “fast money” or “hot money” tends to flow from the megabank’s trading activities and assorted manipulations, but Standard Chartered doesn’t have a proprietary trading desk – it’s just a big bank.
The fine is substantial as far as regulators are concerned, and massive considering it’s a state agency, so I can see the political speech of this being hailed as some sort of great victory, but nonetheless, the financial weapons of mass destruction known as derivatives and toxic assets have not disappeared, nor have the fraudulent and criminal banks.
Despite the NYDFS’ failure to address this cancer that is so often ignored by anyone who actually has the government authority to do anything about it is no surprise. However, the fact that increasingly, the conversation is going back to the banks and having them to answer past their standard bought responses is changing things for the better, no matter how marginal it may seem at the time – ever remember a time when people were this hostile to the banks outside of the moments closely after the collapse of 2008? Yeah, that’s what I mean.