Business regs

As the Great Depression came to an end, many new laws were introduced to prevent similar problems from happening again and some of these regulations were about banks. For 40 years things were maintained in a lawful way but in 1982 Reagan deregulated the banks and trouble soon followed. Over the years financial institutions have been caught on a regular basis cheating the system in one way or another. Financial institutions are under the lens of regulators, and that scrutiny looks like it will only continue to grow. In fact, financial institutions that lack compliance and due diligence were already fined a staggering $2.7 billion in 2021, according to our "AML Fines 2021 Report." Here is one example. JP Morgan agrees to pay $920 million in connection with schemes to defraud US treasury markets. Why hasn't this activity put a stop to this behavior. The answer is two fold. First no one goes to jail and second the fines don't hurt. JP Morgan is worth $2,600 billion and so this fine represents .03% of their holdings and they made far more than that on the scam. This illustrates why a free market economy requires oversight by the government but the government must take this responsibility seriously.