Six Banks Pay $5.8B, Five Plead Guilty to Market Rigging
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
At best, this is a bit of theater to try to convince the world that these banks are not more powerful than governments, but let's be honest... They are.
When you can manipulate the entire world's market via a chat room and this is the best a government can do, you know no one holds sway over you.
Not to mention, this is blatant collusion.
Comcast must be pissed. We're worried about a Comcast/TW monopoly - in the meantime banks are acting like a single entity, manipulating global markets for their own gain, and I haven't heard a single peep about breaking them up. Not from the U.S., not from the EU, who are busying themselves being worried about Google...
How can I be anything but pessimistic about the future global oligarchy?
However since banking is regulated, it might be possible to "ban" people from the game, which is to say take an individual out of the bank, forfeit a years wages and bonuses, and ban them from working in any financial institution in the future.
The reasoning behind that sort of penalty is as follows, most "rich" bankers have a fairly high cash burn rate, forfieting a year of wages & bonuses would not bankrupt them but it would force them to stop for a period of time and recover their budgeting. Banning them from financial institutions would take them out of the game with respect to recreating the bad thing they did before, and ideally force them to find a different way to make money. Finally, by not actually putting them in jail you save the taxpayers a ton of money.
As for prison, I'm not worried about the deterrent - I want the punishment dealt out. The number of lives hurt by these games are huge. We jail people for things that are so infinitesimally small by comparison. On the individual level (and call it vengeance if you must, I call it justice) I want these people to pay for their crimes, just as I would have to pay.
Makes you wonder how in bed they are with the DoJ!