Comment by wavefunction | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wavefunction | Hacker News Reader

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I suppose the many banks that have been fined for _actively_ laundering money shouldn't have done that then, casting a pall as it has over the entire industry.

It's always 'boohoo the Banks are so troubled' but how hard is it to refrain from actively laundering money for drug cartels or third world despots or any number of other illicit sources? How hard is it to refrain from rigging the LIBOR or selling sub-prime CDOs to your clients to clear your own books after marking years of profit building up another debt bubble?

I have very little patience or sympathy for the modern banking industry and their travails screwing the rest of us over, and getting off with rather unimpressive fines, if we're honest.

This guy had his entire account seized. What if the banks were fined commensurate to their profits and they really started to feel the pinch? That, combined with personal liability for the officers involved with these scandals would certainly clean the problem up expeditiously.

You realise that no bank was fined for _actively_ laundering money? And by that I mean there was no institutional conspiracy to do so. The money laundering that occurred was facilitated by a very small number of low-level staff who hid what were doing (e.g cashiers in branches), plus a slightly larger number who didn't pick up the activity.

What the banks were fined for was insufficient controls to detect laundering, not laundering itself. Banks process 100s of millions of transactions a day, including taking large numbers of cash deposits in developing countries like Mexico. It is _incredibly_ hard to build a framework which reliably detects suspicious activity without a lot of false positives. But given the potential repercussions, banks are being very cautious. They cannot afford more scandals.

So HSBC helped drug cartels launder a billion dollars due to the actions of a few tellers?

No way. Even a cursory examination will find many cases where banks were suspected of actively facilitating criminal activity.

>You realise that no bank was fined for _actively_ laundering money?

And no banker was jailed for 2008.

> And by that I mean there was no institutional conspiracy to do so.

That simply means that the conspiracy was too big to reasonably punish. Too many friends of the prosecution would have been hurt, so miraculously nobody was charged.

> But given the potential repercussions, banks are being very cautious. They cannot afford more scandals.

Which is what the OP was saying. We've dumped risk on the banks and now they're hurting legitimate customers to avoid that risk. And because it's essentially mandatory to have a bank, customers are being forced to use services that - like Paypal - will hold their money for months or years without feedback simply because they can.

They don't care that they freeze your accounts and you can't pay your mortgage, they're indemnified against claims from customers. "Oh, sorry, it was vaguely related to anti-money laundering. Check back in 90 days."

It's almost like our governments are trying to make us use non-bank solutions.

That is absolutely not true. There is evidence from HSBC at executive levels that they knew exactly what was going on:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/outrageous-hsbc-se...

"As a result of the government's investigation, HSBC has . . . "clawed back" deferred compensation bonuses given to some of its most senior U.S. anti-money laundering and compliance officers, and agreed to partially defer bonus compensation for its most senior officials during the five-year period of the deferred prosecution agreement."

Faced with a lot of this knowledge, HSBC officials stated that to implement more AML would reduce profitability, and as such, they should "change their position".

I'm sorry but this is blatantly untrue. Look at any sanctions violation case, for example, and you find examples of stupid emails with bankers saying "DO NOT MENTION <sanctioned country> ANYWHERE ON THIS PAYMENT."

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