Banks across the world are under investigation for a string of alleged misdeeds, including fixing benchmark interest rates and manipulating foreign exchange markets.
Speaking in Ohio late last week, the presumptive Republican vice-presidential nominee, Paul D. Ryan, accused China of stealing intellectual property, blocking access to its markets and manipulating the exchange rate.
One way would be to press the I.M.F. to officially pronounce on whether China is breaking the rules and manipulating its exchange rate.
It was quite separate from tackling successive misjudgments (such as AAA-rated junk bonds) and scandals such as mis-sold consumer products and conspiracies to manipulate foreign exchange and bank rates.
"It's inconsistent," thundered the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, in an interview with Der Spiegel, "for the Americans to accuse the Chinese of manipulating exchange rates and then to artificially depress the dollar exchange rate by printing money".
Germany's finance minister accused the Americans of hypocrisy—"It's inconsistent for the Americans to accuse the Chinese of manipulating exchange rates and then to artificially depress the dollar exchange rate by printing money," he said.
The government is also probing Citigroup in connection with manipulating foreign exchange markets and other offenses.
JP Morgan – which stepped to buy Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual during the 2008 crisis – has already paid $660m to settle charges from regulators for manipulating foreign exchange markets, and at the start of 2015 became the first bank to settle civil charges in relation to this manipulation.
Yet none has apparently been able to penetrate the secrecy that surrounded the tax dodging activities of the highly successful Swiss subsidiary that was acquired back in 1999 – any more than they were able to detect, let alone halt, some of the wrongdoings of the recent past, which have led to a $618m fine for manipulating foreign exchange rates and a $1.9bn fine for money laundering.
In the CBS show "Person of Interest," two cloud-based A.I.s are locked in a power struggle, manipulating stock exchanges, operating shell corporations, and giving orders to acolytes who regard them with quasi-religious reverence.
