Banks pay fines, but nobody goes to jail

I posted on this before. The Department of Justice was prosecuting banks for rigging the foreign exchange markets, and now banks agreed to pay fines, more than a billion for Citigroup and J.P. Morgan-Chase.

Fines now have exceeded 200 billion as a result of illegal activities, but nobody yet went to jail. Impunity persists. Full story here.

Banks colluded to alter the price of foreign currencies says USJD

Ramanan suggested to me that this is old news. If it is I missed it the first time. At any rate the Department of Justice is prosecuting banks now for rigging the foreign exchange markets.

Bill Black: Too Big to Jail

Bill Black author of the fantastically titled The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One on Bill Moyers explains why nobody has been prosecuted in Wall Street after the 2008 crisis. 

New Levy Working Paper: Shadow Banking - Policy Challenges for Central Banks

By Thorvald Grung Moe*

Central banks responded with exceptional liquidity support during the financial crisis to prevent a systemic meltdown. They broadened their tool kit and extended liquidity support to non-banks and key financial markets. Many want central banks to embrace this expanded role as “market maker of last resort” going forward. This would provide a liquidity backstop for systemically important markets and the shadow banking system that is deeply integrated with these markets. But how much liquidity support can central banks provide to the shadow banking system without risking their balance sheets? I discuss the expanding role of the shadow banking sector and the key drivers behind its growing importance. There are close parallels between the growth of shadow banking before the recent financial crisis and earlier financial crises, with rapid growth in near monies as a common feature. This ebb and flow of shadow-banking-type liabilities are indeed an ingrained part of our advanced financial system. We need to reflect and consider whether official sector liquidity should be mobilized to stem a future breakdown in private shadow banking markets. Central banks should be especially concerned about providing liquidity support to financial markets without any form of structural reform. It would indeed be ironic if central banks were to declare victory in the fight against too-big-to-fail institutions, just to end up bankrolling too-big-to-fail financial markets.

Read rest here.

*Thorvald Grung Moe is a senior adviser at Norges Bank.

Gerald Epstein: Too-Big-To-Fail Advantage Remains Intact For Big Banks

Gerald Epstein:

Yeah, well, I think there are some noteworthy things. First of all, just to explain what this means, what it means is that these largest banks, like Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and so forth get an advantage when they borrow money in the financial markets, because the people who lend them money believe that if they get into trouble, the government will bail them out, that the taxpayers will bail them out. And this has been known since at least 1984, when Continental Illinois Bank almost went under and the government bailed them out, and then the government said, well, we're going to bail out the 11 biggest banks that are too big to fail, and we're going to bail them out in the future. And, of course, that's exactly what happened in the financial crisis of 2007-2008. So when investors lend money to these big banks, we've thought for a long time that they expect that they're going to get bailed out if they get into trouble, so they'll charge less money to these big banks...