A group of these banks and, remarkably, their main regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), are telling Mr Spitzer to back off.On June 17th, Mr Spitzer expressed outrage at legal efforts by the OCC and several banks, including HSBC, Wells Fargo and J.P. Morgan Chase, to block his investigation.
Another, cited in 2009 by the bank's primary regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), as being unqualified, was promoted.HSBC's compliance problems were hardly an internal secret.
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), U.S. government bureau that regulates national banks and federal savings associations.
"Subcommittee investigators found that the OCC" — that's the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is the nation's primary bank overseer — "had failed to take a single enforcement action against the bank, formal or informal, over the previous six years, despite ample evidence" of money laundering, reads the report.
If the result is a mountain of corpses, the OCC will neither know nor care.
The OCC remarks that "the Somali situation is a terrible human tragedy that cannot be solved by bank regulators".
Last Friday, after the OCC had sent it a cease-and-desist order, the last bank in the United States still processing money transfers to Somalia closed its service.
Senators Levin and Tom Coburn, the two senior members of the committee, slammed the OCC for serving as an ineffectual industry "lapdog".
The OCC, a part of the Treasury, offers them alternative supervision by national charter.Since January 2004, the OCC's rulebook for national banks has taken precedence over some consumer rules in various states, which makes life much easier for banks that cover a number of states.
The proportion of households' income spent on servicing debts did not budge as interest rates dropped, according to the OCC.
Its boss, Eugene Ludwig, once led America's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC); most of its staff have come from the public sector.
