The Labor Department announced it would hold a public hearing in January to review whether Credit Suisse should be granted a waiver to continue overseeing many pension funds and individual retirement accounts. The agency gave the bank a temporary exemption to continue doing such work while the review continued to “avert possible disruptions in retirement plan investments.”

The Labor Department also announced that it had proposed a waiver for Credit Suisse, but that no decisions would be finalized until after the public has had its say at the Jan. 15 hearing.

After intense scrutiny from some lawmakers, Credit Suisse pleased guilty in May to helping U.S. citizens evade taxes, making it the largest bank in the last two decades to do so.

Lawsky was a tiger in his job.  Reports on his departure talk about is interest in the Bitcoin and bringing it into the monetary system.  He came to know many people prominrent in the Bitcoin community.

But more than virtual currency, Lawsky fought Payday Loans,  He was also a spokeman for ‘No Banker Too Big to Jail.”  He irritated NY State Attorney General Eriic Schneiderman, who he also got to be more active in looking into banking activities.  Lawsky had shamed him by speaking out.

One wonder why this brave soul is leavaing before his work is done.  Maybe no one wants him to do his work.

The Attorney General in Waiting for Senate confirmation has treated big banks with kid gloves in the past. As a lawyer, her clinets were often white collar criminals from the financial industry.  She was involved in LIBOR, many issues involving subprime mortgages and also security ratings agencies.

Lynch basically got her first six years of white collar criminal defense experience working at the firm that is currently responsible for keeping the bankers behind the great subprime mortgage grift out of jail. The firm is also defending the financial institutions that jacked up interest rates on everything from student loans to home loans out of greedy self-interest. They even defended the agencies that knowingly rated worthless mortgage-backed securities as AAA, setting up millions to lose their retirement savings in a snap.

After six years of exemplary work at this law firm, Lynch walked through the revolving door to the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Eastern district of New York, which plays a major part in investigating financial crimes.   She was chief of the office’s Long Island division by 1998, and was tapped as U.S. Attorney by June of 1999, where she remained until 2001. Then, Lynch walked back through the revolving door to return to defending white collar criminals.

From 2003 to 2005, Lynch sat on the board of the New York Federal Reserve, working directly under future US Treasury secretary Geithner.

Unless some unforesenn issue arises, Lynch will survive her senate confirmation hearing. Senator Dick Durbin once referred to his chamber as overly subservient to the big banks, saying,  “They own the place.”  It is well to remember that Hillary Cinton, the presumptive democratic Presidential nominee got to know the same bankers in her husband’s administration that have continued in the Obama administration, are connected to Lynch and of course Mrs.Clinton’s favoirte Wall Street bank, Goldman Sachs.

The Attorney General of New York State remarked:  “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large. Again, I’m not talking about HSBC; this is just a more general comment. I think it has an inhibiting influence—impact on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate.

What were the banks doing?  Mortgage lenders  would go out into neighborhoods, and during this boom period, they were giving mortgages to anybody and everybody with a pulse, essentially. They were especially low-income neighborhoods. They were offering these very advantageous loans to people, whether they could afford the houses or not. They were buying huge masses of these loans.  They were called like “liar’s loans,” or stated income where no one even checked whether the person had the income to actually pay it off.

Investigative journalist Matt Taibbi writes: Tthese settlements, they always come up with a big number, but the number is always actually—when you actually look at the accounting, it turns out to be smaller than they announce. In the case of the Chase settlement, the number they announced was $13 billion. But there’s a couple of really important factors here. One is that $7 billion of that—it’s $7 billion, right?—was tax-deductible, which means that all of us, American citizens, anybody who pays taxes, actually picked up the check for about $2.4 billion worth of the settlement. So we paid part of that settlement, which is crazy. I mean, the ordinary person, if we get a speeding ticket, we can’t deduct that when we go to pay our taxes. But these people cratered the world economy, and they get to write a tax deduction for it.

Bankers who condcut business this way are careful not to do anything illegal, although their activities are often immoral, unethical and wrong.

In most developed countries there are laws on the books which prevent bankers from conducting fradulent business.  These laws are often not enforced.  If we are goiing to clean up corrupt business practices of banks, we must enforce the laws on the books.   Banks have to be treated as a special form of business.  They deal in other people’s money and be watched like hawks by public officals and citizens alike.

US regulators are re-upping their case against Standard Chartered, a British bank.  They are doing this under US domestic laws which forbid trading with Iran.   These laws do not apply to foreign banks, so the case is a false one.  Nonetheless, shares in the bank fell precipitously when the US announced its new investigation.

British politica leaders have refused to get involved.  Some think that the bank has no choice but to move back to Shanghai where it began in 1858.

US regulators will not touch a US banker like Jamie Dimon, who until recently was the President’s personal banker among his many roles.  They are trying to defend themselves to US citizens cangry at banks by attacking foreign banks like Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank.  Meanwhile Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Citibank are sailing through with no criminal charges lodged against them.  Fines which seem huge to ordinary citizens are just the cost of doing business for big banks.

Steven Scheer writes:   Israel arrested 14 people, including a senior UBS investment adviser, as part of an investigation into Israelis allegedly holding undisclosed bank accounts with UBS worth hundreds of millions of euros, the Tax Authority said on Wednesday.  All 14 had been released on bail soon after their arrests.
In addition to the unnamed senior investment adviser at UBS who was arrested in June in Tel Aviv, 12 Israelis with accounts at UBS had also been arrested, including two suspects who own a chain of health clinics abroad, said the tax authority. An accountant for the clinics was also arrested.  An Israeli court allowed publication of the arrests and allegations following a petition by an Israeli newspaper. The court is considering whether to release the names of those arrested.
Israel is starting to crack down on foreign bank accounts held by its citizens after a similar move by the United States to track accounts held by Americans abroad.  The tax authority said it had carried out a long investigation into accounts held by Israelis in Swiss banks and received information that thousands of Israelis maintain accounts in Switzerland, worth hundreds of millions of euros.

The authority said that the UBS adviser had arrived in Israel the day before he was arrested. He had met Israeli clients at a luxury hotel in Tel Aviv the following day.
“The meetings were held under secret surveillance of tax authority investigators,” it said. “At the end of the meeting …all the participants were arrested.”
Searches were subsequently made in the hotel room of the UBS adviser, UBS’s office in Israel and in other locations.  Among the adviser’s possessions, investigators found lists of hundreds of Israelis with unreported bank accounts in Switzerland, the authority said, adding that he is accused of helping clients intentionally and deliberately avoid reporting and paying taxes.
It said the adviser — directly responsible for dealing with the accounts — would visit Israel for secret meetings with clients who did not want to send instructions and documents to the bank by phone, mail or fax to avoid revealing that they held Swiss bank accounts.
Leumi, Israel’s second largest bank, last week said a settlement with U.S. authorities over possible tax evasion by the bank’s American clients could be far higher than previously estimated.
The total penalty could reach as much as $600 million, based on Leumi’s previous estimate as well as a settlement offer from New York State’s financial regulator.

Lawyer David Boies has a shot at an upset win in the trial of Maurice “Hank” Greenberg’s $25 billion bailout case against the U.S. government, a turnaround from the weak odds he was given just a month ago.