Forget The Drug Dealers And Iran, HSBC Is Having A Great Year

Forbes

The Sinaloa cartel commits unspeakable violence in Mexico and for years banked at HSBC. Together with Columbian drug traffickers, Sinaloa thugs moved $881 million through HSBC between 2006 and 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice said yesterday. But the market doesn’t seem to care.

This week the U.S. government announced that HSBC would be paying $1.9 billion to settle severe money laundering problems at the bank, including illicit transactions involving drug dealers and Iran. The big European bank signed a deferred prosecution agreement and got hit with some pretty horrible headlines. The New York Times editorial page lamented that HSBC was “too big to indict,” calling it “a dark day for the rule of law.”

HSBC’s stock price spiked up, which is not a surprise because the bank’s stock has been largely unaffected by the biggest money laundering forfeiture in banking history. Amid the disclosure of trillions of dollars in wire transfers that the bank did not monitor and hundreds of millions of dollars of dirty money that moved through it, HSBC is having a great year. The bank’s stock is up 31% in 2012. The drop in the stock price that hit its shares after the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations first aired HSBC’s dirty laundry in July turned out to be a very temporary bump in the road.

As many have pointed out, neither the bank nor any bankers have been indicted. Maybe that is good public policy, maybe it’s not. Some people have lost their jobs. Various branches of government have been able to claim a pound of flesh. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office will probably get half of the $375 million HSBC is paying to deal with allegations it removed identifying information of sanctioned countries from transactions. Cyrus Vance Jr. will distribute that to New York State and New York City. The Treasury Department and the Department of Justice will split the rest of the HSBC money.

HSBC will probably not engage in this kind of behavior again, thanks to the many compliance changes it will make under its settlement with the government, including the appointment of a monitor. HSBC will be crawling with former U.S. government officials from places like the Treasury Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration, who will find high-paying work for the big bank. But will other banks be further galvanized into investing in anti-money laundering reforms any more now than before the HSBC saga?

Even Lanny Bauer, Assistant Attorney General of Justice Department’s criminal division, provided the bank with some cover “This is not a case where the HSBC people intended to create money laundering,” Brewer said. “They did not have the controls in place that they needed.”

HSBC’s underlying pre-tax profits rose by 125% to $5 billion in its most recently reported quarter. Its fourth quarter figures will probably be hit by the money laundering tax it essentially is paying to the U.S. government.