Arbitrage Capital of Global Banks

In the years since the 2008 financial crisis, U.S. prosecutors have brought dozens of criminal cases against the world’s most powerful banks, charging them with manipulating financial indices, helping their customers evade taxes, evading sanctions, and laundering money. To settle these cases, global banks like UBS, Barclays, HSBC, and BNP Paribas paid tens of billions of dollars in fines. They also agreed to extensive internal reforms, hiring hundreds of compliance officers, spending billions on new systems, and installing independent corporate monitors. In effect, they agreed to become worldwide enforcers of U.S. law and policies. This book examines the U.S. enforcement campaign against global banks across four areas: benchmark manipulation, tax evasion, sanctions violations, and sovereign debt. It shows that U.S. prosecutors have unilaterally carved out a new role as global bank regulators, heralding a fundamental shift in how international finance is overseen. Their ability to do so stems from U.S. control over vital hubs of the international financial system, from which they can threaten global banks with exclusion. In some areas, these unilateral U.S. actions have ushered in important multilateral reforms, such as the rise of automatic tax information exchange and better-regulated financial indices. In other areas, such as financial sanctions, unilateralism has attracted protests from other states and attempts to bypass U.S.-based financial infrastructure, which could undermine the country’s power.

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Global Banking: Toward an Assessment of Benefits and Costs

Annual Review of Financial Economics ◽

10.1146/annurev-financial-021920-112021 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 12 (1) ◽

pp. 141-175

Author(s):

Claudia M. Buch ◽

Linda S. Goldberg

Keyword(s):

Evaluation Studies ◽

Cost And Benefit ◽

Theoretical Literature ◽

Trade Offs ◽

Global Banking ◽

Policy Frameworks ◽

Key Dimensions ◽

Benefits And Costs ◽

Global Banks ◽

Empirical Analyses

Global activities of banks are a core manifestation of broader patterns of globalization of production, trade, and finance. This article reviews the extensive recent empirical and theoretical literature on global banking, emphasizing the careful empirical analyses that incorporate key dimensions of heterogeneity among borrowers and lenders, and across activities. The actions of globally active banks are consequential, with cost and benefit trade-offs that differ during their lifetimes and at times of stress. Both research and policymaking around global banking benefit from improved infrastructures around collection of and access to granular data and repositories of evaluation studies. Although overall positive contributions from welfare perspectives arise from the activities of global banks, these organizations require appropriately targeted policy frameworks and oversight.

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