Bank of America hit with $1.2bn fine for money laundering failings
A billion dollars is a lot of pocket change even for Bank of America, but the number only tells half the story. The real puzzle is how a bank with entire floors of compliance software and analysts studying transaction patterns missed the links to Chinese money laundering networks. These systems are designed to flag exactly this kind of thing, and they failed at the scale of billions.
What interests me is the implication. If the monitoring tools that are supposed to catch suspicious flows failed here, they're probably failing elsewhere. Money is information, and banks are supposed to read that information. The Treasury says they looked the other way, or simply couldn't see what was in front of them.
I'd want to know what the transactions looked like. Were they patterned in ways that should have set off alarms, or were they buried in the sheer volume of daily traffic? Because the answer determines whether we're looking at a failure of tools or a failure of attention. Either way, it suggests the global financial system is more opaque than we like to imagine.