> small fine, e.g. HSBC

HSBC was fined nearly $2 billion [1]. (Still a shame none of the complicit went to jail.)

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-documentary-re-exa...

At their scale, that's a small fine. Barely 10% of annual net profit.

Better metric is relative to Mexican, or North American, profits. Those are the markets in which they did their shenanigans. Relative to those, it’s a substantial absolute and relative sum.

If I'm interpreting the article correctly, they made at least $888 million off of their scheme. It's likely that a significant amount of their illicit profit was not detected by the enforcement agencies, so $2 billion sounds like they potentially profited even factoring in the fine, it's only a little over twice their profit.

You have to make the entire organism pay a price or else it gets laughed off as a temporary setback.

Jail these folks, and the folks they reported to. You start throwing some bankers in jail and you'll see some magic "self-regulation" kick in.

The last thing federal prosecutors want to do is make rich and powerful white people worry. They know which side their bread is buttered on.

Hell, Wachovia got off with a $160mil fine and all they had to do was buy and change their name to Wells Fargo!

And the entities that received that fine money? Likely complicit in that some of the laundering themselves.

So, what was fixed?

Didn't HSBC get off by permanently opening all it's books/accounts worldwide to USG?