“The Justice Department has a suggestion for banks hoping to avoid criminal charges: Rat out your employees.” By agreeing to throw individuals under the bus, the company as a whole will qualify for valuable cooperation credits. [Ben Protess, New York Times “DealBook”] On a similar culture-of-informants theme, Eric Holder is proposing to further boost bounties for Wall Street informants into more massive contingency-fee territory: “Mr. Holder will urge Congress to allow bigger whistleblower rewards under the 1989 Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act…. Current law caps any Firrea whistleblower payment at $1.6 million.” [Wall Street Journal, earlier coverage and specifically]
Posts Tagged ‘banks’
“The increasing criminalization of corporate behavior in America…”
“…is bad for the rule of law and for capitalism,” opines The Economist, saying regulation-through prosecution has become “an extortion racket,” from hundreds of millions in Google drug-ad settlement money spread among Rhode Island police departments, to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s muscling in to extract money from BNP Paribas in a settlement of legal offenses against U.S. foreign policy as distinct from New York consumers:
Who runs the world’s most lucrative shakedown operation? The Sicilian mafia? The People’s Liberation Army in China? The kleptocracy in the Kremlin? If you are a big business, all these are less grasping than America’s regulatory system. The formula is simple: find a large company that may (or may not) have done something wrong; threaten its managers with commercial ruin, preferably with criminal charges; force them to use their shareholders’ money to pay an enormous fine to drop the charges in a secret settlement (so nobody can check the details). Then repeat with another large company. …
Perhaps the most destructive part of it all is the secrecy and opacity. The public never finds out the full facts of the case, nor discovers which specific people—with souls and bodies—were to blame. Since the cases never go to court, precedent is not established, so it is unclear what exactly is illegal. That enables future shakedowns, but hurts the rule of law and imposes enormous costs.
Banking and finance roundup
- Following public furor, are feds backing off “Operation Choke Point” program discouraging banking services to lawful but disfavored enterprises? [Daily Signal] Or does the choking continue? [Washington Business Journal (Capital One cuts off check-cashing firms)]
- FATCA challenge: “Ontario women sue Ottawa over compliance with new U.S. banking law” [Winnipeg Free Press, earlier]
- Corporate tax inversions: yes, journalist Jonathan Alter really did recommend “McCarthy-era loyalty oaths” [Taranto/WSJ] Obama admininstration was for them (in Delphi case) before it was against them [Bloomberg] And they’re popular with President Obama’s donors even aside from Warren Buffett [same] More: Charles Krauthammer.
- WSJ editorial on sanctions against Robbins Geller in Boeing securities suit. More: Daniel Fisher;
- Profile of Vanguard tax informant David Danon [Philadelphia Inquirer, earlier]
- Some Denver foreclosure lawyers settle overcharge case [Kevin Funnell, earlier]
- Contains real juice: “$35 million will go to groups that provide legal, housing and community development programs.” [AP/The Saratogian on New York’s share of Bank of America settlement; Stephen Bainbridge]
Feds to put monitors inside two banks
Via Politico, a WSJ news item from last month that should not pass unremarked:
New York’s banking regulator is pushing to install government monitors inside the U.S. offices of Deutsche Bank and Barclays … as part of an intensifying investigation into possible manipulation in the foreign-exchange market … The state’s Department of Financial Services notified lawyers for the two European banks earlier this month that it wanted to install a monitor inside each firm, based on preliminary findings in the agency’s six-month currencies-market probe … Negotiations are continuing over the details of the monitors’ appointments, but New York investigators expect to reach an agreement soon.
The regulatory agency has selected Deutsche Bank and Barclays for extra scrutiny partly because the records it has collected so far from more than a dozen banks under its supervision point to the greatest potential problems at those two banks, the people said. Plus, Deutsche Bank and Barclays are among the dominant players in the vast foreign-exchange market, so investigators hope a close-up view into their businesses will help them observe other players and trading patterns [emphasis added — W.O.].
We’ve covered the expanding role of settlement and litigation monitors in past posts, and noted the seemingly arbitrary and unaccountable powers these monitors may exercise during their stay within the enterprises to which they are embedded. But there’s something novel (isn’t there?) about the installation of monitors loyal to state overseers whose mission includes watching other firms and market players besides the one that has admitted misbehavior (or has been found by a court to have misbehaved). When you have dealings with a company, and perhaps decide to entrust your sensitive personal or business data to it, should you be worried that it wind up crossing the screen or desk of a quietly emplaced monitor reporting back to Albany, or perhaps Washington?
Operation Choke Point
Cato event held earlier this month with Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Cato senior fellow Mark Calabria. Here’s the description:
Launched in early 2013, “Operation Choke Point” is a joint effort by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the bank regulators to limit access to the bank payments system by various businesses. Initially targeted at small-dollar nonbank lenders, Choke Point has grown to cover a variety of legitimate, legal businesses that just happen to be unpopular with DOJ, such as gun dealers and porn stars. Initial responses from DOJ claimed such efforts were limited to illegal businesses committing fraud. A recent report by the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform reveals DOJ’s claims to be false. In today’s economy, almost any economic activity depends on access to the payments system; allowing DOJ, without trial or a right to appeal, to arbitrarily limit access represents an almost unprecedented abuse of power.
Banking and finance roundup
- Federally run consumer complaint database at CPSC has been unfair and unreliable mess, so naturally CFPB wants one of its own [Kevin Funnell]
- Los Angeles, Miami, Providence, and Cook County among municipalities piling on lenders with mortgage and disparate-impact suits [same]
- “Just one way to stop corporate tax inversions: cut taxes” [Chris Edwards, NYT/Cato; more]
- “The IPO is dying. Marc Andreessen explains why.” [Timothy Lee, Vox via Tyler Cowen]
- No mercy for the Swiss: feds’ “fierce campaign” on overseas tax compliance “doing more harm than good” [The Economist; Doreen Carvajal, New York Times]
- “Pretty much everything George Dvorsky says at io9 about corporate personhood is wrong” [Bainbridge] Dodd-Frank turns four, alas [same]
- “There was no evidence, period.” Preet Bharara loses one as jury acquits in insider trading case [Ira Stoll, Future of Capitalism]
Citigroup to pay $7 billion in mortgage settlement
WSJ editorial this morning: “We hold no brief for Citi, which has been rescued three times by the feds…. [But] good luck finding a justification for [the $7 billion figure] in the settlement agreement. The number seems to have been pulled out of thin air since it’s unrelated to Citi’s mortgage-securities market share or any other metric we can see beyond having media impact.
“This week’s settlement includes $4 billion for the Treasury, roughly $500 million for the states and FDIC, and $2.5 billion for mortgage borrowers. That last category has become a fixture of recent government mortgage settlements, even though the premise of this case involves harm done to bond investors, not mortgage borrowers.” More: Bloomberg. And the settlement directs Citigroup to hire former Eric Holder associate Thomas Perrilli, now at Jenner & Block, for a monitorship that is likely to prove an extremely lucrative plum [Reynolds Holding, Alison Frankel] Also: Ira Stoll.
Banking and finance roundup
- In banking and FCPA cases, targets of DOJ prosecution are disproportionately firms domiciled abroad, and other countries do notice that [Jesse Eisinger, NYT “DealBook”]
- “Los Angeles’ Confused Suit against Mortgage Lenders” [Mark Calabria, Cato] Providence also using disparate impact suits in hopes of making banks pay for its housing failures [Funnell]
- Podcast discussion on Operation Chokepoint with Charles J. Cooper, Iain Murray, and Todd J. Zywicki [Federalist Society, earlier]
- New round of suits against banks based on ATMs’ imperfect wheelchair accessibility [ABA Journal, earlier here]
- Walgreen’s could save billions in taxes if it moved to Switzerland from U.S. Whose fault if anyone’s is that? [Tax Foundation]
- “Left unmentioned: how fed regulation and trial lawyers deter banks from protecting themselves with overdraft fees.” [@tedfrank on NYT report about banks’ use of databases to turn down business from persons with records of overdrawing accounts, a practice that now itself is being targeted for regulation]
- Scheme to seize mortgages through eminent domain stalling as cities decline to come on board [Kevin Funnell]
Banking and finance roundup
- Payday lenders sue federal agencies over Operation Choke Point [Bloomberg News, Business Journals, earlier; more, Funnell]
- Speaking of those lenders: “California Supreme Court to review ‘rent-a-tribe’ arrangement for payday lenders” [CL&P, more]
- “If someone starts trying to blame the Global Financial Crisis on ‘de-regulation’, you can stop reading…” [Lorenzo via Arnold Kling]
- Can we just admit that the feds’ real target in the Credit Suisse case was the bank’s customers? [ABA Journal]
- Maryland does not approve of Bitcoin [my Free State Notes via Kevin Funnell]
- Behind Halliburton v. Erica P. John Fund, SCOTUS’s big case on securities class actions, two lawprofs are jousting [Alison Frankel, Reuters, and there’s a Cato connection; earlier]
- For expats, FATCA raises “prospect of being discriminated against as an American for all things financial” [Peter Spiro/OJ; Sophia Yan, Money] More renounce U.S. citizenship [Yahoo] A Canada-based FATCA resource [Isaac Brock Society] Earlier here, etc.
Strangling bank access for lawful businesses
Report from Rep. Darrell Issa’s oversight committee blasts Operation Choke Point [The Hill, earlier here, here]
P.S.: More from Todd Zywicki at Volokh and Glenn Reynolds at USA Today; and earlier from American Banker and from the Washington Times (gun dealers say Operation Choke Point, FDIC guidelines squeezing their access to banks)]