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Thursday, August 20, 2015

Banking Ethics

One is tempted to say that Banking Ethics is an oxymoron. Given their role in crashing the world economy on the tax payers dime in 2008 and leaving millions to suffer ever since that would seem an accurate observation. Add a host of other sins and it would seem to be an understatement. 

We have bankers laundering dirty money of every kind, telling the drug cartels, “If it’s cash we’ve got your stash.” We have bankers scheming to fix international interest rates and help rogue nations avoid sanctions. We have bankers recruiting tax cheats. Our Justice Department maintains that sending these criminals to jail might jeopardize the world economy as if they haven't already done that as part of their pursuit of profits and bonus bucks. Instead, we give them fines they see as no more serious than a parking ticket. Yet, just let any of these banks have a couple of bad quarters and watch their top guy get the boot. Executive turnover is an everyday thing; to imagine that bankers are too important to jail is madness. 

Yes, many of our bankers -especially those atop the monster banks- are master criminals, however, the vast majority are ethical individuals trying to do their job in a business sector that seems rigged against them. It is long past time that we root out the bad guys, that we remove the incentives to deceive and to gamble with the taxpayer's funds standing by to cover their losses. 

We must reverse the deregulation disaster of the last several decades. We must create an atmosphere that allows the vast majority of bankers to do the job they long to assume. We must never allow banks to become "Too Big to Fail." We must rid our authorities of the notion that anyone, especially bankers are "Too Big to Jail."