Five of the biggest banks in the world pleaded guilty Wednesday to criminal charges and essentially admitted they defrauded their customers. What’s significant about this settlement — beyond the $5.6 billion in fines the banks must pay — is that it marks the end of the practice of allowing banks to neither admit nor deny wrongdoing.
The Justice Department insisted not only on criminal pleas but also that they come from the parent companies and not obscure overseas units, as some banks previously had been allowed to do. And the fines are substantial: The $2.5 billion criminal antitrust penalty that Citicorp, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland collectively must pay is the largest of its kind in U.S. history. Justice also ripped up a 2012 nonprosecution agreement with Switzerland’s UBS and forced the bank, a repeat offender, to plead guilty to felony wire fraud stemming from an older violation.
These guilty pleas may make it easier for other financial institutions, investors and pension funds to seek redress in civil court. The transcripts from the currency traders’ online chat rooms will undoubtedly prove most helpful. “If you aint cheating, you aint trying,” reads one.
So will Wednesday’s deal change the way banks do business? The case of UBS gives one pause.. All told, banks have paid about $100 billion in fines since the financial crisis.
Another way to discourage fraud without unduly punishing an entire industry is to prosecute individuals. Justice officials made it clear that they intend to pursue members of “The Cartel,” the self-described group of traders who colluded from 2007 to 2013 to manipulate currency rates in their favor. To really change behavior, those traders’ superiors — and the executives to whom they report — should have to answer for their inability to stop the criminal misconduct in their midst.
Our associate Andreas Frank has provided continuous documentation of the criminal activities of banks since the inception of this website. He testified in a Labor Department hearing in January, 2015, in which Credit Suisse asked for an exemption after they pled guilty to aiding and abetting tax evasion in the US. They could not continue to do their 2 billion dollar pension business in the US as ‘criminals’ unless they got this exemption. No decision has been reached to date. Criminal pleas only have teeth when they mean something.
