> Obviously revenue is a red herring I disagree. What if it were a company like Amazon that operates with over 100 billion in revenue but less than a billion

> Obviously revenue is a red herring I disagree. What if it were a company like Amazon that operates with over 100 billion in revenue but less than a billion in income (many years actually ending up red)? Would 500 million an appropriate fine for, say, willingly misleading consumers about billions of dollars in fraudulent items? If anything, I'd argue income should be the irrelevant number in a scenario like this, though the only numbers that really should matter are ones based on the magnitude of the damage the wrongdoing causes. > the fines are absolutely significant and do change behavior at the banks Is there any evidence of this? > It is a typical human response to want to crush them under your boot into oblivion, but I think counter-productive. Maybe, but I'd argue penalizing one of the major creators of a global financial crisis with a fine that doesn't even cause them to go into red for _one_ year is even worse. Fines all accounted for, GS profited off of the crisis, no executive lost their job, and the behavior that caused millions to lose homes and pensions continues on almost totally unchanged. The human response is to want justice served, and this isn't it.