“I am furious,” begins an op-ed in the big German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, by Editor-in-Chief Manuela Kasper-Claridge. “FinCEN Files Should Trigger Outrage” is her headline. She is outraged: Once again, secret files acquired by investigative journalists have proven that Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JPMorgan, Standard Chartered, and other behemoths of the City of London and Wall Street engaged in massive criminal money-laundering — $2.3 trillion just from this small batch of 2,500 pages of suspicious activity reports (SARs) – for drug cartels, terrorist gangs, mafia, billionaires, arms runners, and so forth. The megabanks usually collected fees for the illegal transfers long before they filed any SARs, if they did file at all. Goldman Sachs bankers, for example, filed no SARs at all while facilitating a grotesque $7 billion embezzlement by Malaysia’s former prime minister, for which Malaysian prosecutors have, belatedly, finally thrown the book at them.
“But where is the public outrage?” asks Kasper-Claridge. “Where are the calls for heads of banks to resign? Instead, the news has mostly been met with widespread indifference and resignation, with most people seeming to think that nothing can be done about such things.” People are being killed by these bank crimes, she says, correctly. Finally she ends up with this: “To counter this, we need well-functioning national and international supervisory authorities that employ the best in the business. Criminal money flows must be stopped. In the end, our money is at stake. That’s more than enough for us to be furious.”
(https://www.dw.com/en/opinion-fincen-files-should-trigger-outrage/a-55058110)
As if in punctuation, two more Deutsche Bank traders were convicted by U.S. prosecutors on Sept. 24 for fraud in manipulating gold and silver prices, according to Bloomberg News. But these are only two traders at a huge, de facto bankrupt banking behemoth which should have been nationalized and its top executives arrested at any time in recent years.
If Editor-in-Chief Kasper-Claridge feels real, active outrage at this City of London-Wall Street cesspool, she will editorialize for the solution: Not “supervisory authorities that employ the best in the business” or similar fluffery, but break these gigantic crime centers up. Everyone knows that just a few decades ago, such giant marauders did not exist, because of the Glass-Steagall principle of bank regulation.
