Daily Telegraph: Reports that the New York Department of Financial Services is getting ready to stretch Standard Chartered Bank on the rack of truth will come as no surprise to those who have observed the surge in American regulatory xenophobia in recent months.
I have no knowledge either way about what Standard Chartered did or did not do to keep Iran solvent down the years. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’d bent the rules here and there. But I doubt they ever took the decision to flout US law or to become the Islamic Republic’s state-appointed sanctions-buster.
Much more likely, the bank operated on its own behalf, not as an arm of the US Government. Given that international oil trading is conducted exclusively in dollars and that bank settlements with a U.S. currency element are monitored in New York, it is extremely difficult to function as a large corporation without coming under the scrutiny of one U.S. regulatory authority or another. Washington and New York regard all trade denominated in dollars as subject to US law, meaning that regulations written and supervised elsewhere are, to their minds, irrelevant.
Categories: Banks, Behaviour, Crisis, Double Standard, Europe, Hypocrisy, UK, United States