Neighborhood Bully - America Recklessly Throws its Weight Around
By: Peter Schiff
Friday, August 15, 2014
"On June 30, U.S. authorities announced a stunning $9 billion fine on French bank BNP Paribas for violations of financial sanctions laws that the United States had imposed on Iran, Sudan and Cuba. In essence, BNP had surreptitiously conducted business with countries that the United States had sought to isolate diplomatically (sometimes unilaterally in the case of Cuba).
Although BNP is not technically under the jurisdiction of American regulators, and the bank had apparently
not broken any laws of its home country, the fine was one of the largest ever issued by the United States and the largest ever levied on a non-U.S. firm.
The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve made clear that unless BNP forks over the $9 billion (equivalent to one year's of the company's total earnings), the U.S. will prevent the bank from engaging in dollar-based international transactions. For an institution that makes its living through such transactions, that penalty is the financial equivalent of a death sentence.
The fine will be paid."
It seems similar to the kind of things we talk about the government doing to us here on an individual level, except the United States government in collusion with the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank is now doing it to a foreign banking institution.
Regardless of the politics involved, and focusing just on the situation as it relates to the subjects we regularly discuss here, if the U.S. and Federal Reserve have no jurisdiction, and no laws were broken in France, how can BNP Paribas be lawfully fined?
And if they cannot be lawfully fined, then there must be lawful recourse/remedy available to them. With $9 billion at stake, shouldn't those remedies be forthcoming?
Aren't all of the Central Banks of Europe (of which French bank BNP Paribas must be a member bank) and the Federal Reserve Bank in the U.S. all part of the same worldwide banking system?
If so, why don't they handle it internally, rather than give the appearance of a Central Bank civil war?
Seems very strange.