Who Do You Americans Think You Are?

Who ever said that banks are bad actors. Some banks are very bad actors. Take Standard Chartered Bank of England. Their New York branch has been running Iranian money through New York for years. Money laundering can be very lucrative if you don't get caught. Now that they seem to have been just that. Caught, I mean, the response from the bank is, "Who are you telling us, the rest of the world, that we're not going to deal with Iranians." Well,. to answer that, I'd say "We are America, if you want to do business in America, that's who." That's because if you want to do business in America, you have to play by our rules. Actually, they're not alone in this business of flouting U.S. sanctions rules. Some of the other actors are Lloyds, UBS, Credit Suisse, Barclays and some others. It seems to be the case that the bigger the bank, the bigger the misdeeds. Although, I'm sure that some small banks do their share of bad deeds. It just seems like people who roll up their sleeves and pick up a tool and put in a hard day at work have little opportunity to cheat and do harm. They may cheat or they may do harm, but it's difficult to do both. But if they roll up their sleeves and do nothing other than try to figure out how to make money from doing nothing, these folks seem to always want to cheat and do harm. I mean that seems to be the approved way of doing business. In the case of Standard Chartered, they had a handbook for employees on how to get around American sanctions rules. A handbook on how to cheat. Ya can't make this stuff up folks. Well, except that they did make up this handbook. They sat down and wrote or typed out the instructions on what to say, what to leave out and how to report fraudulently.And when they get caught, and are about to be shut down, in America, you can bet there's a handbook on how to apologize in a way that lets them off the hook.