HSBC: the Worldwide Local Bank........for Money Laundering and Rogue Nations. The details of the HSBC money laundering case are simultaneously enraging and sickening. HSBC agreed last month to pay the U.S. government $1.9 billion to settle a suit into widespread money laundering facilitation by the New York branch of Europe’s largest bank. But, this is not mere money we are talking about; it is the daily gang violence on the streets of our cities and towns, it is the increased likelihood that your children will be offered drugs in their schools; it is the abduction of children and selling them into the sex trade. Authorities estimate that the average annual income generated from a trafficked child is $200,000 per year. That money has to be laundered somewhere, by someone.

Money laundering is taking the proceeds of crime (“illegitimate” money) and bringing it into the legitimate financial system so that the criminals can use that money without being tied to those terrible crimes – crimes like the manufacturing and distribution of drugs, selling people into the sex trade, trafficking in illegal weapons, and selling knock-off, unsafe products like toys with high levels of lead paint into the marketplace. By HSBC practices they encouraged this behavior and made a profit because of it.

Those are some of the many possible effects of HSBC’s years of permitting hundreds of trillions of dollars to flow through HSBC Bank U.S.A with no money laundering controls being applied. According to legal documents for the case, HSBC admitted that it failed to apply legally required money laundering controls to $200 trillion in wire transfers alone, in only a three year period, $670 billion of which came from Mexico. $200 trillion – that is approximately 3 times world GDP. In addition to that, they failed to have legally required controls in place with respect to the