U.S. serves as “global policeman” for financial crimes
Jeremy Tordjman penned a piece originally appearing in Agence France-Presse referring to recent American financial crime retributions as filling the role of “global policeman.”
From the article, published domestically by Yahoo! news:
Given the means and opportunity to apply its laws “extraterritorially” with such regularity, the United States has become a kind of worldwide anticorruption police force, and buttressed its geopolitical influence.
“There’s a real nexus between economics and foreign affairs,” said Aaron Klein, head of the center on regulation and markets at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
“The next war is more likely to be fought with bonds than with bombs.”
Tordjman interviewed a source who explained that European countries are unlikely to punish flagship brands, such as Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse — both of which received heavy penalties this week in the U.S.
“There’s a kind of fundamentalism to U.S. law,” said Nicolas Veron, a senior fellow at the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel and the Washington-based Peterson Institute.
“If you break the law, punishment comes down.”