http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/business/banking/article21461478.html
This Wednesday, the Federal Reserve fined Bank of America 205 million dollars as a result of penalties for bad foreign currency practices. Five banks in total who were charged pleaded guilty in this case of a felony. 2.7 billion dollars total were fined. What they pleaded guilty to was manipulating rates on the foreign exchange market and benchmark interest rates. The justice department is trying to put down restrictions on financial crimes. Unfortunately, this does not affect the executives of these relative countries at all. Another crime that it seems that Bank of America has committed may be the falsification or commission of records with other banks and clients. There has been about a one percent drop in the bank's stock since the case.
It seems that once again, the leaders of big businesses are getting off easy. This is not unlike the government bailouts that were given to car companies and such, or of the financial regulations created in the aftermath of the Great Depression. If the people who head corporation such as Bank of America are not held responsible, then nothing is ever really going to change. This is something that the United States has been guilty of for a while. The rich just keep getting richer and those who are less fortunate take the blame for cases such as this, and never seem to catch a break. This is similar to Reagan's plan of trickle down economics and is in the spirit of the rise of conservatism.
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