America’s biggest banks reported nearly $32 billion in profits as inflation and borrowing costs continued pressuring household finances.
Page F118From§Eachthe evening edition — 13 October 2026
THE LEDGER
Treasury's third-largest sanctions fine ever amounts to four cents per dollar Wall Street banks pocketed in profit.
As it ran on the front
The Treasury Department announced, on a Tuesday afternoon after markets closed, that Bank of America would pay more than $1.21 billion for violating sanctions and anti-money-laundering law — the third-largest penalty the department has ever issued. Regulators found the bank failed to report billions of dollars in suspicious transactions, including payments that may have involved Chinese money-laundering networks and criminals operating along the southern border. The department's own language stops at "may." So does ours.
Third-largest is accurate, as far as it goes. The department has issued only two sanctions fines bigger than this one in its history. What the announcement does not say is what else happened this week on the same ledger: America's biggest banks reported nearly $32 billion in combined profit. Set the fine beside the profit and it comes to about four cents on the dollar. Four cents, hon, is a tip. It is not a sanction.…
…(cont) Bank of America has sat at this table before. In January 2013, it was one of ten lenders that paid $8.5 billion to stop a government review of foreclosure paperwork from the Great Recession, and separately agreed to pay $11.6 billion to Fannie Mae, the mortgage finance company that had bought the loans. The review ended before the counting did. That discount was a payout too. It went to the man holding the paper, not the customers whose paperwork started this column.
The pattern is not only the bank's. In March 2023, when a different lender, Silicon Valley Bank, failed — the second-largest bank collapse in American history — the government's response was speed, a weekend seizure, assets handed to the FDIC, not a public accounting of the gap between what the bank owed and what it had kept.
Every one of these records — 2013, 2017, 2023, and this week — arrives with a dollar figure and a superlative attached. None of them has yet closed the gap between what a bank pays when it is caught and what it keeps when it is not. The announcement says historic. The arithmetic says routine.
“They hit Bank of America with the third-biggest fine the Treasury's ever handed out and call it accountability — it works out to about four cents per dollar the whole industry just banked in profit. The same bank paid $8.5 billion back in 2013 to stop regulators from finishing a foreclosure audit, and that audit still hasn't been finished. The fine's not the punishment, it's the toll booth, and the bill lands on whoever's checking account doesn't have room at the top.”
“Look, a $1.2 billion penalty is the third-largest the Treasury's ever imposed — that's accountability, full stop, case closed. Sure, it's a fraction of what the industry reported in profit this quarter, but profit isn't — wait, is profit even the right comparison there? The point is the bank paid, the system worked, and if the number looks small next to $32 billion that's just how big banks are — that's not a talking point, forget I said that.”
The receipts
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The DOJ disbanded its crypto enforcement team in April 2025 and ordered inconsistent investigations closed - while the president's family runs a crypto business CNBC, 8 April 2025 (Blanche memo)
Bank of America ordered to pay historic $1.2 billion over alleged sanctions law violationsThe fine is the third-highest penalty ever issued by the Treasury Department, which found that the bank failed to report billions in suspicious transactions.
The fines on America’s second-biggest bank amount to the third-largest in the department’s history.
The Treasury Department announced that it is imposing more than $1.21 billion in penalties on Bank of America for violations of sanctions and anti-money laundering laws, including by facilitating payments that may have involved Chinese money laundering networks and criminals operating on the southern border. The Treasury announced the…
· For $8.5 billion, ten banks settle to stop mortgage foreclosure process audits. The United States government regulators had been engaged in a loan-by-loan review of home loan practices during the Grea from the morgue, 7 Jan 2013
· Berkshire Hathaway Inc has become the largest shareholder of Bank of America by exercising its right to acquire 700 million shares at a steep discount, more than tripling an investment it made six yea from the morgue, 29 Aug 2017
· American commercial bank Silicon Valley Bank is forcibly shut down by regulators for the U.S. state of California, and its assets controlled by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, after the ban from the morgue, 10 Mar 2023
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.