Maybe the Bush Admin. got so distracted fighting terrorists' money laundering after 9/11 that he forgot about drug cartels' money laundering?
According to a Bloomberg report, Wachovia fired -- naturally! -- the head of its anti-money-laundering unit after he blew the whistle on the bank's laundering drug money for Mexican cartels. "If you don't see the correlation between the money laundering by banks and the 22,000 people killed in Mexico, you're missing the point," he said.
No big bank has ever been indicted for violating the Bank Secrecy Act or any other federal law. Large banks are protected from indictments by a variant of the too-big-to-fail theory, as Bloomberg reckoned: indicting a big bank could trigger a mad dash by investors to dump shares and cause panic in financial markets. "There's no capacity to regulate or punish them because they're too big to be threatened with failure."
Anyhoo, this is just one more reason to support increased concentration in the banking sector thanks to bailouts, and to trust free-marketeering bankers to always do the right thing.
By Robert Oak
June 29, 2010 | The Economic Populist
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