Bankers Behaving Badly -- What Else is New?

Oh, bankers! What would I find to do without you? (Alas, plenty.)

But today seems like a Friday the 13th windfall in banking news. In the New York Times alone, there were four articles about questionable bank dealings:

• Ben Protess, in the DealBook blog, explores the widening Barclays-LIBOR scandal (see my earlier post here; Protess' article is here); apparently Tim Geithner, now Treasury Secretary, then head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, was questioning possible bank manipulation of the London InterBank Offered Rate as far back as 2008, and urging British authorities to "strengthen governance and establish a credible reporting procedure" and to "eliminate [the] incentive to misreport."
• Elsewhere in DealBook, Azad Ahmed and Peter Lattman write about the widening Peregrine Financial turmoil, with $215 million (and counting!) in customer money missing. Its founder is in the hospital following a suicide attempt. Lawsuits have been filed, and Peregrine has filed for bankruptcy. It now appears that regulators missed red flags for years. A Peregrine client apparently "sent a letter to the National Futures Association, the firm’s primary regulator, and the C.F.T.C., asking it to intervene to prevent the firm from misusing its customers’ money" in 2004.
• Wells Fargo has agreed to pay a fine of at least $175 million for allegedly steering black and Latino borrowers into riskier subprime mortgages, charging them higher fees and rates, and otherwise discriminating against minority borrowers during the housing boom, according to Charlie Savage's article. The company denied the Justice Department charges, but in a statement by the president of Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, said that it was settling "to avoid a long and costly legal fight, and to instead devote our resources to continuing to contribute to the country’s housing recovery."
•  And Landon Thomas Jr. and Mark Scott, also in DealBook, report that we can expect, as early as next week, to hear that HSBC senior officials apologizing to U.S. officials "for not cracking down soon enough on money-laundering activities in America." The money laundering, now being investigated by a Senate subcommittee, occurred from 2004 to 2010 and involved drug deals and terrorism, and "could result in HSBC paying fines of up to $1 billion." So much for HSBC's reputation as "one of the more conservatively run and trustworthy of the financial giants based in London.

Add in this morning's breaking news that JPMorganChase's losses "on a soured credit bet" could mount to more than $7 billion, as its "traders may have intentionally tried to conceal the extent of the red ink on the disastrous position." (This is from an article by Jessica Silver-Greenberg, posted on the Times' DealBook blog this morning)

What does all this tell me?

You know my mantra: Regulate, regulate, regulate.

And while you're at it: Regulate the regulators.

And make sure that if bankers are wildly compensated for successful trades, they are equally wildly un-compensated for disastrous losses.

I miss the days when banking was boring.