The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

the HSBC settlement was met with almost universal outrage, with a dash of genuine wonder mixed in. “What’s a bank got to do to get into some real trouble around here?” wrote Forbes magazine, adding, “The ‘I’ll never do it again’ defense has probably never worked in a courtroom, but it was a good-enough promise for U.S. regulators in the case of HSBC’s money laundering activity … let’s just call the world’s biggest, most systemically important financial firms what they are: Immune.” “It is a dark day for the rule of law,” wrote The New York Times, in an unusually pointed editorial. “… Clearly, the government has bought into the notion that too big to fail is too big to jail.”