U.K. EUCHRES EVERYONE.

When it comes to being unethical, British banks yield to no one. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, they display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of banking that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. 

              The End of the LIBOR Party.

Five global banks (Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland among them) must pay - according to MSN - a $5.7 billion fine for manipulating the London InterBank Offered Rate. It's not the crime that matters here - rigging a $350 trillion market for their private advantage - it's the punishment. Although $5.7 billion seems like a lot of money to me, it's nothing to a bank. It's a rounding error. They can dig it out of the couch in the chairman's office. Should it even begin to pinch, they can always pass the expense along to their customers.

It doesn't matter how big a fine a bank must pay, if it's more money than most people  can imagine, it will look like justice.

                            Heidi and Seek.

HSBC has, according to Zacks.com (6/8/15), agreed to pay $42.8 million to the Swiss authorities to settle allegations of money laundering. The news here isn't that a British bank has engaged in money laundering. Three years ago, Standard Chartered was fined $674 million by the U.S. government for secretly channeling $250 billion into the coffers of Iran. It's not even  that HSBC has done it. It was also in 2012 that HSBC paid the U.S. government $1.9 billion to settle charges of money laundering. The news is that this kind of activity is against the law in Switzerland, right? I would have bet my grandmother's gold fillings - in a Swiss vault somewhere - that it wasn't. HSBC, alone, has been implicated in hiding assets worth roughly $120 billion in 30,000 Swiss bank accounts. A great chunk of that coming from Mexican drug gangs. That's right, Mexican drug gangs. (If you want seven heads in a duffel bag, HSBC knows where to get them.) The Swiss, of course, must share part of the blame, but they have part of an excuse. Their banks have been struggling since 1945 to replace the business lost when their biggest client, The Third Reich, went under. (Why else would bubbie's  biters be resting in pieces?)

Not that American banks are willing to cede the moral low ground. Goldman Sachs, for instance, can always be depended on to mount an aggressive offense - or offensive aggression. (See TFT 1/31/14, 3/15/12, 7/20/10 ad nauseum ).