The Big Banks Are Corrupt – And Getting Worse
RINF.com
MAY 22ND, 2015
The Justice Department’s latest settlement with felonious big banks was announced this week, but the repercussions were limited to a few headlines and some scattered protestations.
That’s not enough. We need to understand that our financial system is not merely corrupt in practice. It is corrupt by design – and the problem is growing.
Let’s connect the dots, using news items from the past few weeks:
The Latest Sweetheart Deal
Four of the world’s biggest banks pleaded guilty to felony charges this week, agreeing to pay roughly $5.6 billion in fines for fixing the price of currencies on the foreign exchange market. Justice Department officials made much of the fact that, unlike previous sweetheart deals with Wall Street, this one required the banks’ parent companies to enter a guilty plea.
That’s an improvement over previous deals. But it’s not as significant as it might have been, since the settlement wasn’t finalized until the banks were able to strike side agreements with regulators to ensure they’d be able to keep doing business as usual.
One of the institutions involved in this deal was Citigroup. That’s the bank whose self-written and self-serving “Citigroup amendment” passed Congress last December, a move which made it the target of an epic Elizabeth Warren takedown.
The Rest…HERE
