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It's also interesting how the stocks of UBS, Barclays and RBS immediately rose despite a hefty $5.8 billion in fines. Which in practice aren't actually paid by

• pas 11y ago
  It's not interesting. 6B is much less than a year of profit for all the companies involved, and now with uncertainty cleared, they are now cash cows in the eyes of more people, hence the rise in prices. Also, the "paid by ..." is a very-very interesting topic. Due to their sheer size and market share, they set the price for banking services. They don't even need to collude, but since there are not too many global banking conglomerates, they naturally have a sort of cooperation and competition, which basically leads to similar prices. (Though a bit different price structure, but that's irrelevant for a sizeable enough basket of financial products and sample of consumers.) So, it's quite impossible to force them to eat the fines, because for that you'd need a bank that wasn't on in this "market optimalization", but is large enough to absorb/caputre the market share if the culprits rise prices. But there doesn't seem to be. (And local smaller banks are already doing as good as they could to charm customers away from the big ones, so it's unlikely that they'll help keeping prices down.) However, if it's shareholders, that's not a problem. They should exercise some responsibility when voting with their money. And while we're at that, the same goes for taxpayers and customers too.