The law doesn't exempt anyone from been special. If you break the law and you are found guilty by court, you will do the charges. If law the law start to protect some organization and leave some organizations, then it's sending a bad signal to people. They are not only enabling other banks to do it, they are making way for other banks to want to do worse.
I have this assertion that if an institution is convicted with this kind of penalties, there is more to what was uncover. They only saw what they have as evidence of laundering. Deep down, there is more to what they have done, this is just a tip of iceberg.
They are hit by 1.2 billion dollars, but they didn’t report any illegal transactions totalling over 5 billion, so on the whole he might even have got off lightly because the numbers aren’t accurate.
I agree that if you break the law you have to pay, but it seems the law applies double standards because now the regulators are going all out, driven by the fact that the state needs money to deal with the USA colossal debt, whereas when things are going well, they pick on small savers.
If you launder 5 billion, and then get hit with 1.2 billion penalty, that is not profitable at all. Because when you launder 5 billion, you are not laundering your own money; you are doing that for someone else. Even if we are being generous and say that they got 20% of that, it would still not be as high as the penalty. It means that they are still doing more than 5 billion that government does not know about.
Auditing these super large banks is not easy and we are talking about tens of millions of accounts, maybe hundreds, and billions of transactions. So the IRS and SEC can't really find every single one of the problems in those lists. When they do, they charge these penalties, but then banks still keep doing what they do, because there are more than what the government found out about.
