8 ms·

As Nassim Taleb observed, the problem here is no skin in the game. Bankers keep the upside, but shareholders have to carry the can. It's an agency problem. The

As Nassim Taleb observed, the problem here is no skin in the game. Bankers keep the upside, but shareholders have to carry the can. It's an agency problem. The fix to all this is dispensing some good solid jail time.

MattGaiser 4y ago
This is generally a problem with employees in general, especially as tenures decline. Sales stuffs the channel with products that are later returned as they get their commission. Or they vastly oversell what the product can do. Engineers rack up tech debt to keep the Scrum Master happy and choose technologies based on how good they look on a resume. HR people pass around crappy or abusive employees to other departments rather than doing the hard work of terminating them. Wells Fargo shareholders evidently don't care that much and a big reason for that is that the average shareholder is probably just a fund of sorts, so it isn't really their money either.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  "... so it isn't really their money either." Talk about perverse incentives. Their customers, meaning the people who are directly affected, are like the only ones who don't have any power to influence what happens. And everyone with power to influence the company just isn't affected and doesn't care ...
  - MattGaiser 4y ago
    > Their customers, meaning the people who are directly affected, are like the only ones who don't have any power to influence what happens. They do, but they would need to actually change their spending. That's the other thing. After scandal after scandal after scandal, plenty of people still bank at Wells Fargo.
    - tristor 4y ago
      > After scandal after scandal after scandal, plenty of people still bank at Wells Fargo. It’s not always exactly a choice. Wells Fargo bought my mortgage from a local bank. The only way to change your lender is to do a refinance, which incurs closing costs. Despite several serious WF fuck ups like double and triple charging my mortgage payment, failing to correctly maintain escrow, etc there is literally nothing I could do without losing tens of thousands of dollars until market conditions had changed and enough time made it feasible to re-fi, which I did promptly. The problem with big banks is not just that they’re criminally fraudulent assholes, it’s that they will straight buy your customership on the backend in ways you are locked into. The same thing temporarily made me a Bank of America customer when they just straight bought a local bank chain. I’m now with a credit union and moved everything there, but it’s non trivial to do.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  I think the tenure decline is a symptom of the removal of incentives outside of simple base pay from the majority of employees. When you have a pension that can only be paid in retirement if the company remains solvent you tend not to make these short term choices.
  - MarkPNeyer 4y ago
    What you are drafting is the difference between private ownership (ie the company is owned by current a former employees who have an incentive to keep a watchful eye for long term risks) and public ownership (ie the company is owned by anyone who either buys a share or has money with a fund manager who buys the shares), where no single person has any long term incentives.
- iechoz6H 4y ago
  We have a term for that where I work, 'CV Driven Development', we even have a service called 'Brag'.
- nine_k 4y ago
  > rather than doing the hard work of terminating I don't think that terminating an at-will employee is any hard work. What's hard is to hire a replacement; it can easily take months, and cost months of the employee's salary in the interviewing costs. And somebody got to do the jerk employee's work in the meantime. (And this is in the US; I can't start imagining the hurdles of firing somebody in the EU.)
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > And this is in the US; I can't start imagining the hurdles of firing somebody in the EU. German (and Workers Council member at my employer) here. Firing incompetent workers is possible here, although you do have to show efforts on your part as well to have improved the situation (e.g. by providing training to the employee), and firing malicious-acting employees (e.g. in cases of theft, violence or intentional property damage) is easy. European worker protection laws demand good will from both sides, not just from the employee - so for example you can't be fired because you damaged or destroyed a piece of machinery in an accident if the employer hasn't taken reasonable steps to prevent such accidents, including not overloading your employees with work.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    >I don't think that terminating an at-will employee is any hard work. Contrary to what HN may have implied, you still have to comply with federal labor law in at-will states and if you want to terminate someone in a manner where you can be all but guaranteed you will not have to settle a frivolous wrongful termination lawsuit there is a pretty decent amount of coordination and documentation work that needs to be done. I wouldn't call it hard work but it's not non-work and it does take time.
mbustamanter 4y ago
Taleb's got lots of very critical thoughts on banking in general and bailouts in particular [0]. In a reddit thread he said he's got no banker friends (considers it unethical). He champions free markets with skin in the game constraints, plus scale considerations. [0] https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40nntaleb%20bankers https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40nntaleb%20bankers
newbie578 4y ago
Absolutely true! Bankers can make short term gains by sacrificing long term growth and nobody does anything, because by the time the true costs appear, the "old" bankers are already gone and there is nothing you can do here, and the "new" bankers came after and are not responsible for what their predecessors did. All of a sudden you are in a situation where no one has any accountability and long term thinking is not a viable strategy.
blippage 4y ago
My other suggestion is that to practise banking, one needs a license, which can be revoked. Now that I think of it, Taleb's suggested that banking should be a civil servant job. So, no financial engineering or bonuses, just boring paperwork. In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 (IIRC), the role of regular banking and hedge fund activities was split in two. The idea is, of course, that if all the fancy derivatives blow up, it wouldn't take retail banking with it. I read recently that the UK government was thinking of dropping this, which seemed a bad idea.
- imtringued 4y ago
  That is already case, it isn't formalized though. If you want to be a bank executive you must prove both theoretical and practical skills and management experience. That is already a steep hill. Also, any criminal record, especially related to banking or money makes it harder or outright impossible to qualify.
  - rcxdude 4y ago
    You can also be straight-up banned from the industry, which has the same kind of effect as revoking a license, but doesn't really seem to have been enough of a deterrent.
    - danuker 4y ago
      Banks define their own rules. There is no jail time because unethical behavior is legal or minimally punished. https://www.finance-watch.org/still-going-round-in-circles-the-revolving-door-problem-between-banks-and-their-regulators/ https://www.finance-watch.org/still-going-round-in-circles-t...
- amelius 4y ago
  > to practise banking, one needs a license, which can be revoked. Most banks are "too big to fail".
  - kasey_junk 4y ago
Hermel 4y ago
And this agency problem is partially caused by regulators and "good governance" rules who demand that the board is "independent" from the shareholders. But this makes them have less skin in the game and diminishing the effect of fines!
- blippage 4y ago
  I also found out that in the UK there were bankers on the bank regulation committee. Hmmm, conflict of interest much?
  - mbg721 4y ago
    The problem is, who else would have the desire and expertise to be on the committee? Regulatory capture is a hard problem, because anyone qualified to regulate is going to have some interest.
wcoenen 4y ago
> shareholders have to carry the can Shareholders hold shares by choice, so they don't "have to" do anything. If there are 22 years of records about which fines were paid, then the market must have already priced in this information a long time ago. Shareholders chose to pay that market price.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  > Shareholders hold shares by choice, so they don't "have to" do anything. That's not how pensions, ETFs, index funds or pretty much anything works.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    If some institutions track indexes, why don't indexes drop the chronically underperforming asset? If it's not actually underperforming, that is, a lot of the market does comparably, not much better, them $1B / year is just the cost of doing business, however cynical this may sound.
    - Ensorceled 4y ago
      That's it exactly, it's sociopaths all the way down.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      The rest of the market is doing much better. https://g.co/finance/WFC:NYSE?window=5Y&comparison=NYSEARCA%3AVOO%2CNYSE%3ABAC%2CNYSE%3AJPM https://g.co/finance/WFC:NYSE?window=5Y&comparison=NYSEARCA%...
  - guerby 4y ago
    I wonder what would happen if pensions, funds and other would pass through voting rights of the share they own to the fund share owners. This way if you own a share in a fund or have a right in pension, if the fund chooses to buy shares of company A, when there is a shareholder vote of company A instead having the fund manager to vote, the fund manager would transmit this voting rights to you.
throwawayJA1820 4y ago
In the VC industry too, a lot of alpha is diluted by non-carry gatekeepers.
mettamage 4y ago
Not only him. One of my psych teachers made the same comment in 2007 before the credit crunch. He used to work for abn amro, a Dutch bank
anonu 4y ago
Or just like there are bonuses there should be maluses, that are actually enforced.
Ensorceled 4y ago
CEO/Cxx should go to jail and entire Board of Directors stripped of ALL directorships and fined for breach of fiduciary duty. Sociopaths follow the rules if there are repercussions to breaking them, a fine is not really a repercussion.
mschuster91 4y ago
> Bankers keep the upside, but shareholders have to carry the can. While I'm not against throwing corrupt bank execs in jail, shareholders could also take their job seriously and only send people to the board of directors that actually hold the company officials accountable. Unfortunately, an increasingly large amount of stocks is held by "neutral" investors (=passive ETFs) or neutral-ish investors (pension funds, insurances and the uber wealthy's private wealth management), which creates a lot of leverage for "activist investors" that push for short-term beneficial actions even if these end up damaging to the company long term, such as going for questionably legal operations. [1] https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2022/01/21/myth-busting-etfs-are-eating-the-world/ https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2022/01/21/myth-bust...
- gowld 4y ago
  Buying broad market mutual funds is the banality of evil tht underlies all this.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  To u/gowld: you seem to be shadow banned or immediately downvoted to oblivion, not sure what's the case here (and vouching for it didn't help?). To reply to your point... I agree that broad market funds are a problem, but I would not place the blame on the buyers. We can't expect people to be hobby traders for their retirement funds and it's incredibly risky as well, if going by the regular loss porn on r/wallstreetbets. The problem for me rather lies in the system that the US have set up in the first place by forcing people to invest into the stock markets for their retirement - it gives an insane amount of political leverage to the big corporations (i.e. at least S&P 500), as politicians always have to consider the impact of a political move (e.g. the banning of ICE car sale) on the stock markets because sending the stocks for affected companies tanking has a real impact on voters' retirement security.
itsoktocry 4y ago
>The fix to all this is dispensing some good solid jail time. Ah yes, incarceration, the solution to all of American's problems. How many of these fines are even criminal, let alone worthy of prison time?
- gowld 4y ago
  Why is this question almost only asked about rich criminals, not poor criminals? Maybe if rich people had more skin in the game, we'd see real incarceration reform.
  - SyzygistSix 4y ago
    Not sure why this was labeled [dead]. It seems relevant to me.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
kqr 4y ago
Graeber has an observation on a different part of this: the penalties are never greater than the profit that triggered the penalties. We're basically telling the bankers that "it's okay as long as the government gets a cut of the loot".
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  I'm assuming that's exactly the message the government wants to send. They keep saying it over and over through "administrative actions" and bailouts where the alternative would be arrests and bankruptcies.
- mannykannot 4y ago
  Getting a cut of the loot is at its most pernicious when it is in the form of campaign contributions and inside information.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  >it's okay as long as the government gets a cut of the loot". That's how most "bad things" work. Why would asinine banking practices be different?
  - kqr 4y ago
    It's not exactly how bad-things taxes work, though. Sure, from a business point of view the nicotine tax is seen as "you're allowed to peddle it as long as the government gets a cut of the loot" but from the consumer perspective, there is actually evidence that it reduces the inclination to make the transaction in the first place. This is not the case with banking penalties which are clearly only a net positive exchange for the banks.
- mastax 4y ago
  > the penalties are never greater than the profit that triggered the penalties Are you sure? In the most recent case they had to return all $2B taken from customers and pay a $1.7B fine. I'd be willing to look at evidence to the contrary. (Cynicism is not evidence)
tjpnz 4y ago
I like the idea of prison time but that's only going to happen with an impartial legal system that treats everyone the same; regardless of wealth, upbringing or Ivy League attendance among others. In the meantime how about fining companies so much that the bank will become insolvent if they don't give a crap and passing laws (if they don't exist already) to force a halt in trade for x-days/weeks?
- trey-jones 4y ago
  I think the banking industry is already very heavy regulated since 2008. In fact these regulations are (in my limited experience) at least as bad for the consumer as for the banks. Dealing with banks in general since 2008 has been a huge pain in the ass, and it's not really the bankers' faults (other than the huge debacles that led to regulation). Better to just let the banks doing stupid risky crap fail instead of even more regulation. And if the stupid risky crap they're doing is also illegal, then make the penalties matter, as others have already said.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    >Dealing with banks in general since 2008 has been a huge pain in the ass, In which ways? I cannot say I have noticed any difference pre and post 2008. If anything, the CFPB which was established after 2008, helped save me a ton of time and effort when I could not easily get a hold of a bank employee who could resolve my issue.
- pwillia7 4y ago
  What would be the 'cost' international competition wise to harming your own banking sector with penalties for the banks and not individuals? It's not a leading question. Are there enough banks and enough 'good' banks to do this obvious domestic win with no international consequences?
- CogitoCogito 4y ago
  > I like the idea of prison time but that's only going to happen with an impartial legal system that treats everyone the same; regardless of wealth, upbringing or Ivy League attendance among others. Why? These inequities exist all over the US legal system yet prison time is handed out for many offenses anyway.
Forgeties79 4y ago
WF keeps doing this over and over. It’s baffling how the fines haven’t just gone up exponentially and folks haven’t gone to jail. They literally do not care. They know exactly what will happen and the math makes sense every time.

MattGaiser 4y ago

This is generally a problem with employees in general, especially as tenures decline. Sales stuffs the channel with products that are later returned as they get their commission. Or they vastly oversell what the product can do. Engineers rack up tech debt to keep the Scrum Master happy and choose technologies based on how good they look on a resume. HR people pass around crappy or abusive employees to other departments rather than doing the hard work of terminating them. Wells Fargo shareholders evidently don't care that much and a big reason for that is that the average shareholder is probably just a fund of sorts, so it isn't really their money either.

fxtentacle 4y ago
"... so it isn't really their money either." Talk about perverse incentives. Their customers, meaning the people who are directly affected, are like the only ones who don't have any power to influence what happens. And everyone with power to influence the company just isn't affected and doesn't care ...
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  > Their customers, meaning the people who are directly affected, are like the only ones who don't have any power to influence what happens. They do, but they would need to actually change their spending. That's the other thing. After scandal after scandal after scandal, plenty of people still bank at Wells Fargo.
  - tristor 4y ago
    > After scandal after scandal after scandal, plenty of people still bank at Wells Fargo. It’s not always exactly a choice. Wells Fargo bought my mortgage from a local bank. The only way to change your lender is to do a refinance, which incurs closing costs. Despite several serious WF fuck ups like double and triple charging my mortgage payment, failing to correctly maintain escrow, etc there is literally nothing I could do without losing tens of thousands of dollars until market conditions had changed and enough time made it feasible to re-fi, which I did promptly. The problem with big banks is not just that they’re criminally fraudulent assholes, it’s that they will straight buy your customership on the backend in ways you are locked into. The same thing temporarily made me a Bank of America customer when they just straight bought a local bank chain. I’m now with a credit union and moved everything there, but it’s non trivial to do.
willcipriano 4y ago
I think the tenure decline is a symptom of the removal of incentives outside of simple base pay from the majority of employees. When you have a pension that can only be paid in retirement if the company remains solvent you tend not to make these short term choices.
- MarkPNeyer 4y ago
  What you are drafting is the difference between private ownership (ie the company is owned by current a former employees who have an incentive to keep a watchful eye for long term risks) and public ownership (ie the company is owned by anyone who either buys a share or has money with a fund manager who buys the shares), where no single person has any long term incentives.
iechoz6H 4y ago
We have a term for that where I work, 'CV Driven Development', we even have a service called 'Brag'.
nine_k 4y ago
> rather than doing the hard work of terminating I don't think that terminating an at-will employee is any hard work. What's hard is to hire a replacement; it can easily take months, and cost months of the employee's salary in the interviewing costs. And somebody got to do the jerk employee's work in the meantime. (And this is in the US; I can't start imagining the hurdles of firing somebody in the EU.)
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > And this is in the US; I can't start imagining the hurdles of firing somebody in the EU. German (and Workers Council member at my employer) here. Firing incompetent workers is possible here, although you do have to show efforts on your part as well to have improved the situation (e.g. by providing training to the employee), and firing malicious-acting employees (e.g. in cases of theft, violence or intentional property damage) is easy. European worker protection laws demand good will from both sides, not just from the employee - so for example you can't be fired because you damaged or destroyed a piece of machinery in an accident if the employer hasn't taken reasonable steps to prevent such accidents, including not overloading your employees with work.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  >I don't think that terminating an at-will employee is any hard work. Contrary to what HN may have implied, you still have to comply with federal labor law in at-will states and if you want to terminate someone in a manner where you can be all but guaranteed you will not have to settle a frivolous wrongful termination lawsuit there is a pretty decent amount of coordination and documentation work that needs to be done. I wouldn't call it hard work but it's not non-work and it does take time.

mbustamanter 4y ago

Taleb's got lots of very critical thoughts on banking in general and bailouts in particular [0]. In a reddit thread he said he's got no banker friends (considers it unethical). He champions free markets with skin in the game constraints, plus scale considerations. [0] https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40nntaleb%20bankers https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40nntaleb%20bankers

newbie578 4y ago

Absolutely true! Bankers can make short term gains by sacrificing long term growth and nobody does anything, because by the time the true costs appear, the "old" bankers are already gone and there is nothing you can do here, and the "new" bankers came after and are not responsible for what their predecessors did. All of a sudden you are in a situation where no one has any accountability and long term thinking is not a viable strategy.

blippage 4y ago

My other suggestion is that to practise banking, one needs a license, which can be revoked. Now that I think of it, Taleb's suggested that banking should be a civil servant job. So, no financial engineering or bonuses, just boring paperwork. In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 (IIRC), the role of regular banking and hedge fund activities was split in two. The idea is, of course, that if all the fancy derivatives blow up, it wouldn't take retail banking with it. I read recently that the UK government was thinking of dropping this, which seemed a bad idea.

imtringued 4y ago
That is already case, it isn't formalized though. If you want to be a bank executive you must prove both theoretical and practical skills and management experience. That is already a steep hill. Also, any criminal record, especially related to banking or money makes it harder or outright impossible to qualify.
- rcxdude 4y ago
  You can also be straight-up banned from the industry, which has the same kind of effect as revoking a license, but doesn't really seem to have been enough of a deterrent.
  - danuker 4y ago
    Banks define their own rules. There is no jail time because unethical behavior is legal or minimally punished. https://www.finance-watch.org/still-going-round-in-circles-the-revolving-door-problem-between-banks-and-their-regulators/ https://www.finance-watch.org/still-going-round-in-circles-t...
amelius 4y ago
> to practise banking, one needs a license, which can be revoked. Most banks are "too big to fail".
- kasey_junk 4y ago

Hermel 4y ago

And this agency problem is partially caused by regulators and "good governance" rules who demand that the board is "independent" from the shareholders. But this makes them have less skin in the game and diminishing the effect of fines!

blippage 4y ago
I also found out that in the UK there were bankers on the bank regulation committee. Hmmm, conflict of interest much?
- mbg721 4y ago
  The problem is, who else would have the desire and expertise to be on the committee? Regulatory capture is a hard problem, because anyone qualified to regulate is going to have some interest.

wcoenen 4y ago

> shareholders have to carry the can Shareholders hold shares by choice, so they don't "have to" do anything. If there are 22 years of records about which fines were paid, then the market must have already priced in this information a long time ago. Shareholders chose to pay that market price.

Ensorceled 4y ago
> Shareholders hold shares by choice, so they don't "have to" do anything. That's not how pensions, ETFs, index funds or pretty much anything works.
- nine_k 4y ago
  If some institutions track indexes, why don't indexes drop the chronically underperforming asset? If it's not actually underperforming, that is, a lot of the market does comparably, not much better, them $1B / year is just the cost of doing business, however cynical this may sound.
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    That's it exactly, it's sociopaths all the way down.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    The rest of the market is doing much better. https://g.co/finance/WFC:NYSE?window=5Y&comparison=NYSEARCA%3AVOO%2CNYSE%3ABAC%2CNYSE%3AJPM https://g.co/finance/WFC:NYSE?window=5Y&comparison=NYSEARCA%...
- guerby 4y ago
  I wonder what would happen if pensions, funds and other would pass through voting rights of the share they own to the fund share owners. This way if you own a share in a fund or have a right in pension, if the fund chooses to buy shares of company A, when there is a shareholder vote of company A instead having the fund manager to vote, the fund manager would transmit this voting rights to you.

throwawayJA1820 4y ago

In the VC industry too, a lot of alpha is diluted by non-carry gatekeepers.

mettamage 4y ago

Not only him. One of my psych teachers made the same comment in 2007 before the credit crunch. He used to work for abn amro, a Dutch bank

anonu 4y ago

Or just like there are bonuses there should be maluses, that are actually enforced.

Ensorceled 4y ago

CEO/Cxx should go to jail and entire Board of Directors stripped of ALL directorships and fined for breach of fiduciary duty. Sociopaths follow the rules if there are repercussions to breaking them, a fine is not really a repercussion.

mschuster91 4y ago

> Bankers keep the upside, but shareholders have to carry the can. While I'm not against throwing corrupt bank execs in jail, shareholders could also take their job seriously and only send people to the board of directors that actually hold the company officials accountable. Unfortunately, an increasingly large amount of stocks is held by "neutral" investors (=passive ETFs) or neutral-ish investors (pension funds, insurances and the uber wealthy's private wealth management), which creates a lot of leverage for "activist investors" that push for short-term beneficial actions even if these end up damaging to the company long term, such as going for questionably legal operations. [1] https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2022/01/21/myth-busting-etfs-are-eating-the-world/ https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2022/01/21/myth-bust...

gowld 4y ago
Buying broad market mutual funds is the banality of evil tht underlies all this.
mschuster91 4y ago
To u/gowld: you seem to be shadow banned or immediately downvoted to oblivion, not sure what's the case here (and vouching for it didn't help?). To reply to your point... I agree that broad market funds are a problem, but I would not place the blame on the buyers. We can't expect people to be hobby traders for their retirement funds and it's incredibly risky as well, if going by the regular loss porn on r/wallstreetbets. The problem for me rather lies in the system that the US have set up in the first place by forcing people to invest into the stock markets for their retirement - it gives an insane amount of political leverage to the big corporations (i.e. at least S&P 500), as politicians always have to consider the impact of a political move (e.g. the banning of ICE car sale) on the stock markets because sending the stocks for affected companies tanking has a real impact on voters' retirement security.

itsoktocry 4y ago

>The fix to all this is dispensing some good solid jail time. Ah yes, incarceration, the solution to all of American's problems. How many of these fines are even criminal, let alone worthy of prison time?

gowld 4y ago
Why is this question almost only asked about rich criminals, not poor criminals? Maybe if rich people had more skin in the game, we'd see real incarceration reform.
- SyzygistSix 4y ago
  Not sure why this was labeled [dead]. It seems relevant to me.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

kqr 4y ago

Graeber has an observation on a different part of this: the penalties are never greater than the profit that triggered the penalties. We're basically telling the bankers that "it's okay as long as the government gets a cut of the loot".

pclmulqdq 4y ago
I'm assuming that's exactly the message the government wants to send. They keep saying it over and over through "administrative actions" and bailouts where the alternative would be arrests and bankruptcies.
mannykannot 4y ago
Getting a cut of the loot is at its most pernicious when it is in the form of campaign contributions and inside information.
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>it's okay as long as the government gets a cut of the loot". That's how most "bad things" work. Why would asinine banking practices be different?
- kqr 4y ago
  It's not exactly how bad-things taxes work, though. Sure, from a business point of view the nicotine tax is seen as "you're allowed to peddle it as long as the government gets a cut of the loot" but from the consumer perspective, there is actually evidence that it reduces the inclination to make the transaction in the first place. This is not the case with banking penalties which are clearly only a net positive exchange for the banks.
mastax 4y ago
> the penalties are never greater than the profit that triggered the penalties Are you sure? In the most recent case they had to return all $2B taken from customers and pay a $1.7B fine. I'd be willing to look at evidence to the contrary. (Cynicism is not evidence)

tjpnz 4y ago

I like the idea of prison time but that's only going to happen with an impartial legal system that treats everyone the same; regardless of wealth, upbringing or Ivy League attendance among others. In the meantime how about fining companies so much that the bank will become insolvent if they don't give a crap and passing laws (if they don't exist already) to force a halt in trade for x-days/weeks?

trey-jones 4y ago
I think the banking industry is already very heavy regulated since 2008. In fact these regulations are (in my limited experience) at least as bad for the consumer as for the banks. Dealing with banks in general since 2008 has been a huge pain in the ass, and it's not really the bankers' faults (other than the huge debacles that led to regulation). Better to just let the banks doing stupid risky crap fail instead of even more regulation. And if the stupid risky crap they're doing is also illegal, then make the penalties matter, as others have already said.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  >Dealing with banks in general since 2008 has been a huge pain in the ass, In which ways? I cannot say I have noticed any difference pre and post 2008. If anything, the CFPB which was established after 2008, helped save me a ton of time and effort when I could not easily get a hold of a bank employee who could resolve my issue.
pwillia7 4y ago
What would be the 'cost' international competition wise to harming your own banking sector with penalties for the banks and not individuals? It's not a leading question. Are there enough banks and enough 'good' banks to do this obvious domestic win with no international consequences?
CogitoCogito 4y ago
> I like the idea of prison time but that's only going to happen with an impartial legal system that treats everyone the same; regardless of wealth, upbringing or Ivy League attendance among others. Why? These inequities exist all over the US legal system yet prison time is handed out for many offenses anyway.

Forgeties79 4y ago

WF keeps doing this over and over. It’s baffling how the fines haven’t just gone up exponentially and folks haven’t gone to jail. They literally do not care. They know exactly what will happen and the math makes sense every time.