Six years after the financial crisis, Paul Mason of Channel 4 News in England is officially fed up with watching big banks screw their clients, while financial regulators continue to dole out little to no punishment for each new banking scandal.
It’s six years since I had to stand outside RBS for its near collapse and I’m sick of having to return there… rant: http://t.co/QFpKrvqSJw
— Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) November 12, 2014
“I have sat in the rooms where they’re pleading in the most genteel tones, ‘Don’t over regulate us. Don’t make it possible for us to go to jail otherwise no one talented will come and run these banks,” an exasperated Mason said on camera.
“If we’re going to have a complex finance system, we’re have to do something a bit more radical than all this cuff-link tweaking.”
Mason’s refreshingly honest take comes as six banks, including the Royal Bank of Scotland where Mason is seen standing outside in the recording, were recently fined $2.6 billion pounds after a 13-month investigation by regulators in both the United Kingdom and United States found the banks to be rigging the foreign exchange market. But criminal charges for the employees involved? Nope.
Mason says if “the banks had the same scrutiny over the traders and their own managers as they have over the camera crews standing outside,” perhaps there would be no need for such an investigation and yet another round of fines.
“All we ask, all we can ask, is that the regulators do their job proactively,” Mason says, steps away from RBS’s headquarters. “That they actually get on the case, just like the security guards outside here, and the CCTV cameras there, and the City of London police, they get on the case and stop wrong doing – what’s so hard about it?”
