Did Another British Bank Behave Badly?

I was raised in Miami, a place with a proud tradition of money laundering. Three decades ago, when the city was awash in cocaine riches, it was not uncommon to see people walk into banks with Samsonites full of $50 and $20 bills. All-cash, zero-haggle bids on luxury cars, condos, and thoroughbreds were the rage. Today, retired dopers will regale you with tales of the overnight counting operations of unscrupulous banks, as can this column from Bloomberg View’s Jonathan Weil, a fellow South Florida native.

As audacious and outsized as it may have seemed at the time, Miami’s funny money has nothing on the industrial scale of money laundering that has allegedly gone on at Standard Chartered (STAN:LN), the London-based bank that dominates Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. On Aug. 6, New York’s Department of Financial Services said that Standard Chartered had violated U.S. economic sanctions by collecting hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for handling $250 billion in transactions for Iranian institutions. As a result, the bank’s U.S. unit—which totes up $41 billion of the company’s overall $624 billion in assets—may be suspended from doing business in the Empire State. The NYDFS’s order warning (PDF) pulls few punches: