Matt Levine, Columnist

Levine on Wall Street: Stories of the Well-Connected

Hank Greenberg: Well-connected. A Washington lobbyist: ditto. BNP Paribas: less so, though I guess the French finance minister counts for something. And Sergey Aleynikov had a good weekend.

June 23, 2014 at 11:38 AM UTC

By Matt Levine

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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BNP Paribas is near a deal.

The good news: Previous reports of a $10 billion fine seem to have been slightly exaggerated. The bad news: Everything else. Specifically, "the bank would pay $8 billion to $9 billion" (a discount from the $60 billion sticker price of its alleged transgressions, though "Officials readily concede that such a sum would be unreasonable and uncollectable"), would plead guilty to "conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act" and would face "a temporary ban -- likely lasting a period of months -- on the company's ability to transact in U.S. dollars." That seems bad, for a bank!1 Also BNP will round up a bunch of people it's already fired, and fire them again: