Fines as special tax rates?
The NYT reported that:
Standard Chartered, the British bank, has agreed to pay New York’s top banking regulator $340 million to settle claims that it laundered hundreds of billions of dollars in tainted money for Iran and lied to regulators.
(Dan here…We do not know how much remained with Standard Charter as various kinds of fees, admin., and charges…was there a premium for risk?)
…it falls near the middle of the collective settlements that the Justice Department and the Manhattan district attorney have reached with other global banks in recent years over money laundering charges, from $619 million with ING bank in June to $298 million with Barclays in 2010.
For a bit of speculation directly from the article with no special knowledge, let’s comparison shop for human consumption and readers:
($345,000,000 / $250,000,000,000 = .00138 = one tenth and a bit of a percent) and to compare to a more human scale, if you handled $100,000 for ten years in business it would be $1,000,000 times .00138 = $1,380 fine. Not a hard thing to pay.
Another way to think of it is: If you made 10% (Who knows?) of 250 billion as retained in some way in costs (salaries, bonuses, use of facilities risk premiums and such) that is 25 billion, so the fine might be ten times a % of money made billable at 2.5 billion/year, and a fine of 1.38 %, means a $345,000,000 fine out of $2,500,000,000 billable for the year. A special tax rate of 1.38% for one year for risks over a decade is pretty good, no?
What am I missing?
You are missing nothing. Fines are a small cost of doing [illegal] business.
These were bank transfers. Not trading, not stocks, securities, diervatives. Just plain old “take the money from this account and put it in that one over there”.
Banks might charge a $20 fee for doing this. Heck, maybe $100.
But total revenues from having done all this business would be in the Hubdreds of millions of $ range. A trvial percentage of the total amount flowing through.
Don’t forget, there is no margin here, no bid and offer gap. There’s no FX trade. It really is just moving money from one account to another.
At a guess, but one that is almost certainly more accurate than the ones above, I’d say that total revenues were around $340 million. That’s why the fine is that amount.