Professor William Black:

When I was an enforcement and litigation director I negotiated these things all the time and here is the key that you need to understand. Bankers make the decision and their priorities are not to go to jail, not to lose their job and not to have their bonuses clawed back. To accomplish those three things they also have a fourth priority to not throw anybody junior to the wolves. In the United States we have much broader plea bargaining powers than exists in most of Europe. If you throw the junior person to the wolves we will flip him which means we will get him to plead and to testify about the more senior people. The committee will note that in all of these major deals in the United States nobody got named, loses their bonus, loses their job or goes to jail and they are happy to trade off fines.

The fines sound large. They are large in absolute terms but relative to JP Morgan Chase, to pick a non-random example, they are literally a few weeks' revenue so they do not care. Also, bankers do not pay the fines; it is the shareholders. This is the third in a triple whammy hit if you follow the recipe to the extent that the banks have followed this recipe. First, they have caused huge losses to the shareholders directly by making bad loans intentionally. Second, they have taken a whole lot of money that should have gone to the shareholders in the form of bonuses for destroying the institution or at least causing huge losses. Third, they come along and are happy to sign an agreement in which the shareholders pay the fines to make sure that they have no accountability. Therefore, this is an utterly useless exercise in terms of deterrence.