The Singapore manager of the former Falcon Private Bank branch was sentenced to 28 weeks in jail for crimes uncovered during the 1MDB investigation. The bank decided not to report suspicious transactions that were used to funnel criminal proceeds between banks. The branch was closed in October after regulators discovered the scale of money laundering there. More banker trials will follow in the 1MDB case, in Singapore and elsewhere.
The ghost account scandal that came to light last year has reduced Wells Fargo’s earnings, revenue, and customer base shrinking, and the bank is far from putting the scandal behind it. The bank is not doing itself by delaying its internal investigation, retaining the directors and executives who oversaw the theft of customers’ money and identifies, and having executives talk about the bank’s efforts to distance itself from its past crimes as if nothing had happened.
One last bank failure to report: New Jersey state regulators closed Harvest Community Bank, which had $124 million in deposits, down 40 percent in the last five years, at four branches in Salem County, in the Delaware River lowlands of the southwestern corner of the state. North Carolina-based First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company, which has acquired more than its share of failed banks in recent years, is taking over the deposits and purchasing the assets.
Thank you for reading. It was a wave of real estate speculation and poorly conceived derivatives between 2003 and 2008 that destabilized the global financial system for the six or seven years that followed, causing a wave of bank failures and giving rise to This Week in Bank Failures. The systemic risk from that episode is over, and all but a few of the banks that will fail from the excesses of that period have failed by now. We have entered a new era in which excessive reliance on finance, faltering national governments, low interest rates, poorly secured technology, and a corporate sector moving ever closer to the edge represent the key systemic risks to the global banking sector. Few in banking are aware of the risks ahead, and fewer still are preparing. However, just the scale of the financial sector in its current form is reason for pessimism. It has doubled since 2003 in a vexing example of not learning from history. Scale alone makes a spectacular future collapse all but inevitable even if the shape of events will not be seen far in advance.
At the same time, the stunning advance of fascism in global and U.S. politics makes it more likely that risk factors will be kept hidden until it is too late for anyone to do anything to save the major institutions involved. In a practical sense, it could already be too late, and we would have no way of knowing.
Though it has been a privilege to chronicle bank risks, misdeeds, and failures these last nine years, the read-and-react dynamic that This Week in Bank Failures was based on no longer serves. The premise seems almost quaint when set against the known risks ahead, not to mention the unknown ones. While I admire those who will carry on the work of identifying and reducing the risks to be found in the political, financial, and corporate spheres, all three have grown in scale beyond any meaningful participation by the ordinary person. For a period of at least several years ahead, most of us will need to narrow our efforts to work on things that are more knowable. This is a shift that is already well underway and easy to see if you want to look for it, and I will have more to say about it in the near future.
Based on that change in the world’s focus, I want to close by repeating the most important advice that This Week in Bank Failures has had to offer over the years. Don’t put all your money, if you have very much of it, in one bank. Know your country’s deposit insurance limits and work within them. Always have some food and some cash on hand. Don’t rely on only one provider to process your transactions. Don’t try to optimize your financial arrangements, now that that strategy has shown itself to be so easily exploited. Don’t lean more heavily than you have to on a financial system that might vanish one night while you are sleeping. Do anything you can to maintain your ability to work. When you see the early signs of a collapse, don’t just assume that powerful men will fix it and nothing will happen to you, but don’t panic either; instead, during a crisis, take simple actions to make your arrangements more sturdy. Good luck!
