Salon.com
Tuesday, Jul 17, 2012 11:05 AM EDT
Money laundering for drug dealers, terrorists and gangsters is the latest evidence of financial sector corruption
(Credit: Reuters/Toby Melville)
And you thought bankers fixing interest rates and playing games with mortgage-backed securities was bad? How about laundering money for Mexican drug dealers, the Russian mafia and Mideast terrorists?
OK, if we’re talking about the potential economic impact on the average person, the interest rate and mortgage shenanigans are really bad, probably more so than the money laundering apparently brokered on a massive scale by the huge international bank HSBC. But even so, the new report from the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations detailing HSBC’s multiple failings over the past years is quite the doozy. It reads like a treatment for a villain in a James Bond thriller that never got greenlighted because it was too unrealistic. We could accept getting in bed with the Russians — but the drug dealers and the terrorists as well? That’s overkill.
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