Daily chart: Fine times

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

THE French bank BNP Paribas was smacked with a record fine of almost $9 billion for violating American sanctions this week, for processing transactions with clients in Cuba, Iran and Sudan. The amount is almost $2 billion more than its total profits last year—and a staggering sum compared with the relatively meagre $667m that Standard Chartered, a British bank, paid in 2012 for similar offenses, albeit on a smaller scale. Yet BNP's hefty fine isn’t the largest amount that a bank has had to cough up for misdeeds. That title goes to JPMorgan Chase, which paid $13 billion last October for shoddy mortgage-backed securities that it sold prior to the financial crisis. But the most expensive string of sanctions and settlements goes to Bank of America, which not only appears four times on the top-ten league table for its mortgage-related practises, but has been stung by a long-tail of other fines, like LIBOR rigging. Since the financial crisis American authorities have collected more than $120 billion, according to data compiled by the Financial Times. Read our leader and article on BNP's woes.

Keep going with the fines that are small chumps for failing global bank models who want to be global conduits of trade and investments and at the same time gaming the systems that sustain them.

Banksters that capture the US/EC financial economies do not go unnoticed by other major creditor economies or the global investors. Only their naive shareholders and clients believe that these models are sustainable and get hoodwinked by their global footprints, etc while desperately gaming markets and systems to compensate themselves.

In 1999, in the immediate aftermath of the Asian Crisis at the end of the 20th century The Economist wrote that Banks may well be regarded as a Public Menace, because Banks seem to be in the middle of every financial crisis and not as innocent bystanders, but as perpetrators. But, The Economist went on saying, its not really the banks fault, but the bankers inside whose incentives drive them to behave that way. That was the beginning of financial integration and globalization and what happened however horrid can be corrected as it mostly has been, with stronger oversight and hefty penalties, But the crisis facing banks today is much more difficult because it compromises the lien of economic growth—debt repayment—and sound money. Its expensive energy. The World cannot grow with oil costing over >$100.00 a barril and if growth cant occur debts cant be paid and all financial stability falls apart, unless government steps in as they have wisely done. The ship of cheap oil (prices<$50bb) has sunk and importing nations are hanging on to life boats until a new source of affordable, safe, renewable, vast and environmentally tolerable source of energy comes along. The good news is that it will happen, that bad news is that it is not soon….The OECD just released a report that predicts low growth scenarios and bigger inequality till the year 2060. I will be 100 years old by then……read The Energy Within Economics and the Bubble Envelope Theory for Human Prosperity.