THESE ARE THE TEN BIGGEST BANK FINES OF 2020
ValueWalk, 07 May 2021
Banking regulators around the globe were busy last year despite the Covid-19 pandemic. Like any other year, the regulators imposed heavy fines on banks and financial institutions for a range of indiscretions, including money laundering, tax evasion and market manipulation. It is estimated that total bank fines amounted to more than $14 billion in 2020, with the U.S. accounting for the majority of them with 12 bank fines. Anti-money laundering (AML) breaches were the most common violation last year. Detailed below are the ten biggest bank fines of 2020. Continue reading “Article: THESE ARE THE TEN BIGGEST BANK FINES OF 2020”
Thomas Gottstein has been CEO of Credit Suisse for 63 weeks. There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of them, and indeed all of the last eight or so, have been waking nightmares. Surely, however, there have been some consecutive five-day calendrical periods that he has enjoyed the job he has presumably been pining and preparing for most if not all of his professional career, some Fridays when he walked out of his office with a genuine spring in his step and ability to enjoy the weekend as much as any Swiss can enjoy such a frivolity.
Deutsche Bank AG reported its strongest quarter in seven years thanks to activity at its investment bank, while the lender escaped the implosion of Archegos Capital Management that badly hit some rivals.
German scandals are not like other scandals. The bouquet of a classic German scandal contains unmistakable notes: a rabbit-hole impenetrability, the implication of an entire guilt-ridden society, and, most importantly, a sense that the controversy says something essential about Germany as a whole. German scandals are collectivized. They are about a belief in German difference, for good or ill. 
Markets were shaken but unstirred by the collapse of Greensill and the Archegos unwind trades. Credit Suisse is the ultimate loser of the two scandals – reputationally damaged and holed below the water line. The bank is paying the price of years of flawed management, poor risk awareness. and its self-belief it was still a Tier 1 global player. Its’ challenge is to avoid becoming the Deutsche Bank of Switzerland – which it will struggle to do without a radical and unlikely shakeout. 
It is a striking paradox that postwar Germany has achieved sustained success as an economy, even with a flailing banking sector, headed by the flag-carrying Deutsche Bank, to underpin it. But there are signs the contradiction may be resolving.
As more details from the now infamous debacle surrounding Tiger cub Archegos, whose massive derivative-based exposures spilled out into the open and transformed into the biggest and most painful rolling margin call to hit Wall Street since Lehman, we now know that at least six Prime Brokers scrambled to unwind the biggest hedge fund blowup since LTCM without hammering the overall market.
Unlike the devastating London Whale debacle in 2012, which was all JPMorgan eventually drawn and quartered quite theatrically before Congress (and was a clear explanation of how banks used Fed reserves to manipulate markets, something most market participants had no idea was possible), this time JPMorgan was nowhere to be found in the aftermath of the historic margin call that destroyed hedge fund Archegos. Which is may explain why JPMorgan bank analyst Kian Abouhossein admits he is quite “puzzled” by the recent fallout from the Archegos implosion (or maybe JPM simply was not a Prime Broker of the notorious Tiger cub), which however does not prevent him from trying to calculate the capital at risk from the Archegos collapse. 