What Does It Take To Close A Bank Down?

What does it take to close a bank down? Between them the world's leading banks have been guilty of laundering money, rigging markets, rigging interest rates and crashing the world's economy. There is, it seems, no crime that their executives will not entertain in order to boost their bonus payments, no risk they would deem to be too dangerous and no swindle they won't try. Yet, despite being found repeatedly with their hand in the cookie jar, not one of them has been prosecuted and not one of them has lost its licence. Governments across the world, with the glaring exception of Iceland, have chosen instead to "fine" them - a practice that is little more than an opportunist tax on criminal activity - while the banks pass on the costs of these to their long-suffering customers. Not only have they been considered to be "too big to fail" they have also been regarded as "too important to prosecute." The banking industry stands revealed as the largest criminal conspiracy the world has ever seen - far larger than the mafia, illegal arms dealers or drug traffickers - and yet not one executive is in prison and not one of them has been closed down. Nothing demonstrates the parlous nature of our much-vaunted democracy in the west than this brazen and unpunished criminality at the very heart of our financial industry and nothing demonstrates more forcibly the sham it actually is. Where is the rule of law in all this? As usual, when it should be applied to wealthy people, it is no where to be seen.