German media makes a point that Deutsche Bank has been hit hard with the fines from their (past) crimes. Investment bankers and CEOs took their bonuses and moved on. Spiegel reports Deutsche Bank used $15 billions since 2012 for legal disputes.
Maybe US should not project their legislation on foreign subjects? They didn't vote for anyone who created that legislation anyway.
If a bank is really big, like HSBC, it can't/won't be penally prosecuted in real world, so the rational choice [1] is actually to keep committing crimes, and settle the ones where they're caught.
On the scale of such bank, even fines which would be astronomical from the perspective of a normal citizen, are peanuts (so to speak) for a large bank.
[1] = in a logical, not moral, sense.
But the standard for banks is now a zero tolerance policy with multi-billions fines for any breach. It is a game they cannot win.
Likewise, regulators in Europe dish out fines a-plenty. The FSA certainly did over the LIBOR scandal recently.
European banks could mitigate risk in the US by trading legally or by ceasing trading there at all. If they really think they can't trade legally then their business is not welcome.
Multinationals just don't work like that.
The problem is that banks absolutely cannot afford to risk going to court, since losing a case could mean losing their ability to deal in USD, which would be the end for them. That means that the banks must settle any case brought by the prosecutors. The prosecutors in New York have used this leverage to squeeze billions in settlements from the European banks. The "justice"system has basically turned into what amounts to a protection racket.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_UnionPay
[2] https://www.rt.com/business/239189-china-payment-system-read...
Your perspective is too generalized, thus ultimately false. The case depends on the size of the bank.
In the case of a famous British bank, the prosecution literally stated that they could not prosecute the bank because it would have been too much of a big impact on the economy.
They got fined with the equivalent of a few weeks of profit, and who knows how much they ever profited from such illegal activities.
Doesn't sound a protection racket to me.
Your comment is farcical; it's been widely written about how lightly banks and other financial institutions get off following egregious violations of law.
Pocket money they pay out of their bailout spoils.
This is a fraud nearly as bad as Kerviel, and happening at about the same time ($8bn unauthorised position), and where Goldman quietly fired the trader and did not report the fraud, which enabled the trader to work at another bank. And for that Goldman was given a mega-fine of..... $1.5m.
It helps to have friends.
a) They were among the worst offenders
b) They tried to get rid of the lawsuits quickly.
> they cannot escape US regulation and legal exposure as
> long as they want to have the ability to trade US dollars
In the most basic trades, possession is settlement. Much of the third world has significant trade in USD, including countries that the US doesn't regard well. In Panama, the USD is a defacto national currency, a choice the crowd has arrived at due to convenience.
You can get an armoured van and deliver packs of physical notes.
You can use contracts to get more complicated arrangements, including where you have USD on paper but backed by an alternative currency. You can do balance sheet adjustments by contract. You can be a dutch firm ordering agricultural goods from Kenya, and do your leg of the transaction by delivering USD. The banks in the middle might exchange physical USD to make it happen, without any of them being regulated by the US at the time. But - probably - they'll just organise the deal in terms of USD using holdings of other currencies or commodities or contract-agreed offsets that are convenient to them.