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France's biggest bank BNP Paribas is facing a record-breaking $8.9bn (£5.2bn) fine from US authorities for allegedly transferring billions of dollars on behalf of Sudan and other countries blacklisted by the US."I want to be clear, we will be punished severely," Jean-Laurent Bonnafe, BNP chief executive, wrote in a memo to staff that emerged this weekend.The US Justice Department is expected to announce the fine and a potential ban from clearing dollar trades for one year at a Manhattan court later on Monday.Details of the US investigation are expected to show BNP Paribas hid the names of clients from blacklisted countries when processing $30bn in transactions through America. Most of the transfers involved Sudanese clients between 2002-2009, but some potentially illegal activity was happening as recently as 2012 while the US investigation was ongoing. The bank is expected to plead guilty.

The $8.9bn fine would be the largest penalty levied by US authorities against a foreign bank, far outstripping the $1.97bn HSBC paid out in 2012 after a US Senate investigation into the bank's role in money laundering for Mexican drug cartels and helping blacklisted clients evade US sanctions. However, BNP Paribas could be seen as getting off relatively lightly: calculations by the Wall Street Journal show that BNP fine equates to 27-30 cents for every dollar of potentially illegal activity, compared with $3.13 per dollar paid out by RBS in 2013 for sanctions busting.On top of the fine, BNP is likely to be banned from clearing US dollar transactions for one year, a damaging blow to its international business.

BNP Paribas earned €39bn in 2013, but profits fell sharply in the final quarter when it reported that it had set aside $1.1bn to pay a fine over US sanctions.

Allegations that Barclays defrauded investors when encouraging them to operate in its dark pool could trigger a fine bigger than the one it paid for attempting to manipulate Libor, it is claimed. The bank was fined £290m in 2012 over the benchmark interest rate, a fine that was shortly followed by the departure of its chief executive Bob Diamond. New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman revealed on Wednesday night a lawsuit against the bank, alleging that Barclays lured institutions into using its private trading venue, known as a dark pool.

It is claimed that the bank told institutions that they were investing in a safe, stable environment with low levels of aggressive traders, while also encouraging those same “predators” to participate in dark pool trading. Barclays is also accused of investing clients’ money in the dark pool even when it would have been better spent elsewhere. Mr Schneiderman is seeking damages related to money lost by Barclays clients, as well as unfairly gained profits and, potentially, punitive fines. An estimate by analysts at Jefferies said the bank may be fined around $525m (£308m) by the authorities, although the analysis said “it is hard to assess the prospective risks around this lawsuit”. Almost £2.5bn was wiped off the value of the company on Thursday after the lawsuit was revealed.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has fined Wells Fargo for $100 million based on fraudulent customer account practices. An additional $85 million is to be paid to the city of Los Angeles in California, along with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Last year Wells Fargo was sued by employees (current and former) and customers all across the nation for setting up “unwanted accounts, unwarranted fees”. According to the lawsuit, this was “the largest California-based bank violated state and federal laws by misusing confidential information and failing to notify customers when personal information was breached.” Using “aggressive tactics” to coerce new customers, Wells Fargo made it “difficult to correct the mistakes” made by Wells Fargo and return fees to customers because of “high-pressure sales culture set unrealistic quotas, spurring employees to engage in fraudulent conduct to keep their jobs and boost the company’s profits.” Over the course of an extended period of time, “Wells Fargo employees secretly opened unauthorized accounts to hit sales targets and receive bonuses.” There were 1.5 million accounts opened without the authorization of customers and 500,000 credit cards accounts to boot. Wells Fargo has consistently blames “a few rogue employees. Five hundred employees were terminated, according to a Wells Fargo spokesperson. There was no mention of rescinding of bonuses paid to those employees, and there is no clear evidence that executive’s payouts totaling $155 million for “performance based compensation” for 2012 through 2013 was returned to the bank.

Those bonuses were administered based on the fraudulent accounts opened without customer approval. In a statement, Wells Fargo expressed belated regret and a sudden desire to “take responsibility for any instances where customers may have received a product that they did not request.” The training that caused this problem in the first place was a cross-selling strategy called “Going For Gr-Eight” which is a brochure for employees to push banking products onto households of existing customers to increase fee potential and overall profitability. Wells Fargo “staffers, fearing disciplinary action from managers, begged friends and family members to open ghost accounts” and forged signatures “and falsified phone numbers” of customers who did not want to open an account. This practice drove Wells Fargo’s financial success with an estimated “26% of the company’s revenue was from fee income, including those from credit and debit card accounts, trusts and investments.” The bank not only stole money from customers but “also damage their credit scores” and put some into collections to garner fees “for unauthorized accounts went unpaid”. In case of a complaining customer, Wells Fargo would “sandbag” their customers; meaning “failing to open accounts when requested by customers, and instead accumulating a number of account applications to be opened at a later date.”

Messages found stored on Clinton’s private email server show that Berger – a convicted thief of classified documents – had been advising Clinton while she served as secretary of state and had access to emails containing classified information. For example, in an email dated Sept. 22, 2009, Berger advised Clinton advised how she could leverage information to make Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more cooperative in discussions with the Obama administration over a settlement freeze.

Law firm ties Berger, Lynch, Mills Berger worked as a partner in the Washington law firm Hogan & Hartson from 1973 to 1977, before taking a position as the deputy director of policy planning at the State Department in the Carter administration. When Carter lost his re-election bid, Berger returned to Hogan & Hartson, where he worked until he took leave in 1988 to act as foreign policy adviser in Gov. Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign. When Dukakis was defeated, Berger returned to Hogan & Hartson until he became foreign policy adviser for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992. On March 28, WND reported Lynch was a litigation partner for eight years at Hogan & Hartson, from March 2002 through April 2010. Mills also worked at Hogan & Hartson, for two years, starting in 1990, before she joined then President-elect Bill Clinton’s transition team, on her way to securing a position as White House deputy counsel in the Clinton administration. According to documents Hillary Clinton’s first presidential campaign made public in 2008, Hogan & Hartson’s New York-based partner Howard Topaz was the tax lawyer who filed income tax returns for Bill and Hillary Clinton beginning in 2004. In addition, Hogan & Hartson in Virginia filed a patent trademark request on May 19, 2004, for Denver-based MX Logic Inc., the computer software firm that developed the email encryption system used to manage Clinton’s private email server beginning in July 2013. A tech expert has observed that employees of MX Logic could have had access to all the emails that went through her account.

A group of global banks will pay more than $5 billion U.S. in penalties and plead guilty to rigging the world’s currency market, the first time in more than two decades that major players in the financial industry have admitted to criminal wrongdoing. JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Barclays and The Royal Bank of Scotland conspired with one another to fix rates on U.S. dollars and euros traded in the huge global market for currencies, according to a resolution announced Wednesday between the banks and the U.S. Department of Justice. A group of currency traders, who called themselves “The Cartel,” allegedly shared customer orders through chat rooms and used that information to profit at the expense of their clients. The resolution is complex and involves multiple regulators in the U.S. and overseas.

The four banks will pay a combined $2.5 billion in criminal penalties to the DOJ for criminal manipulation of currency rates between December 2007 and January 2013, according to the agreement. The Federal Reserve is slapping them with an additional $1.6 billion in fines, as the banks’ chief regulator. Finally, British bank Barclays is paying an additional $1.3 billion to British and U.S. regulators for its role in the scheme. Another bank, Switzerland’s UBS, has agreed to plead guilty to manipulating key interest rates and will pay a separate criminal penalty of $203 million.

It is rare to see a bank plead guilty to wrongdoing. Even in the aftermath of the financial crisis, most financial companies reached “non-prosecution agreements” or “deferred prosecution agreements” with regulators, agreeing to pay billions in fines but not admitting any guilt. If any guilt were found, it was usually one of the bank’s subsidiaries or divisions — not the bank holding company.

Here are some of the good things JPMorgan has done in recent years.  In 2012 it reduced the compensation of Jamie Dimon, its chairman, president and CEO from $23 million to $11.5 million. That was his punishment for all the bad things the bank acknowledged that it had been doing while under his supervision. The bank acknowledged its sins by paying almost $20 billion in fines and penalties. Included in the $20 billion was $13 billion it agreed to pay in November 2013 that was described in the Wall Street Journal as “the biggest combination of fines and damages extracted by the U.S. government in a civil settlement with any single company.” For a bank the size of JPMorgan to pay $20 billion in fines as penance is a bit like the parishioner entering the confessional and seeking forgiveness from the supervisor of the man on the other side of the partition.  It has no effect on his future conduct. Nonetheless, paying the fines was a good thing since each fine was an act of contrition and those acts are always welcomed by those sitting in judgment on bad actors.   Here, however, are two bad things JPMorgan has been doing since leaving the federal government’s confessional at the end of 2013.

t increased Mr. Dimon’s compensation package by 74%, raising it to $20 million as a result of which Jamie’s compensation went from $31,506.84 per day to $54,794.52 per day. Since much of that is in restricted stock he cannot run out and spend it all.  Here is why that was a bad thing for the bank to have done.  It turns out that notwithstanding the $20 billion in penance paid, JPMorgan had discovered yet another way to make money at the expense of its customers.  It did this by ignoring part of the bankruptcy laws.

The bankruptcy law notwithstanding, some do.  Jamie Dimon’s bank is one of them. Just as it bundled subprime mortgages it had issued and sold them to investors at great profit to itself, according to a report in the New York Times, JPMorgan and other banks have been selling debts discharged in bankruptcy to outside investors.  Instead of showing that the debt of an individual to the bank has been discharged and is no longer collectible, the bank continues to described the debt as unpaid and that is how it appears on the borrower’s credit report.  If the borrower tries to get credit following a bankruptcy and the credit report does not disclose that the debt cannot be collected, a discharged debtor may be unable to get a new loan or a job or be otherwise adversely affected.  The bank, of course, makes money by selling the discharged debt to investors who are willing to take the chance that the debtor will continue to pay on the debt in order to get it removed from the credit report.

Yet another dark cloud is looming over global banks as officials examine their behavior in the massive foreign exchange market, threatening to deal a new blow to earnings and reputations. Regulators in the U.S., Europe and Asia are in the early stages of investigating whether traders at the world's top banks manipulated foreign exchange benchmarks to profit at the expense of their clients. Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500), Citigroup (C, Fortune 500), JP Morgan (JPM, Fortune 500), Deutsche Bank (DB), Barclays (BCS), Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), UBS (UBS) and HSBC (HBCYF)are among the firms in their sights. Financial lawyers say the probe could have steep and uncertain consequences as the impact of currency market abuse would reverberate far beyond Wall Street.

It's unwelcome timing for an industry already fighting a raft of legal battles over foreclosure abuses, misleading investors over mortgages and payment protection insurance. And then there's the Libor scandal. A global investigation into the setting of the London interbank lending rate, and related global benchmarks, has so far yielded about $3.6 billion in fines. Penalties for some of the biggest players are still to come. Traders have also faced criminal charges. As the extent of damage caused by Libor-rigging is revealed, lawyers say the probe into fixing currency rates could unfold in a similar way, and rival its impact. London is the center of the loosely regulated foreign exchange market, the biggest in the world's financial system with average daily turnover of $5.3 trillion. Proven abuse in this market would have a significant ripple effect, exposing offending firms to a host of legal action.

The European Commission has slapped record fines of 1.7 billion euros on six major banks for manipulating lending rates that play a key role in the global economy. The penalties will add to already escalating costs for leading global lenders. The EU fines marks the latest to be levied on banks and financial institutions for making profits or masking their problems by fraudulently rigging the rates that reflect the cost of lending money to each other. The banks fined are Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, JPMorgan, Societe Generale, and RP Martin, the EC said in a statement.

The borrowing rates involved - the London interbank offered rate (Libor), the Tokyo and the euro area equivalents - are used to set price of trillions of dollars of financial products, ranging from mortgages to derivatives. “What is shocking about the Libor and Euribor scandals is not only the manipulation of benchmarks, which is being tackled by financial regulators worldwide, but also the collusion between banks who are supposed to be competing with each other,” said Joaquín Almunia, European Commission Vice-President in charge of competition policy.

Customer proprietary network information (CPNI) is the data collected by telecommunications companies about a consumer's telephone calls. It includes the time, date, duration and destination number of each call, the type of network a consumer subscribes to, and any other information that appears on the consumer's telephone bill. Telemarketers working on behalf of telephone companies, attempting to either win back a customer or upsell a customer with more services, must ask the customer's consent before accessing the billing information or before using that information to offer an upsell or any change of services. Usually this is done at the beginning of a call from the telemarketer to the telephone subscriber.

Note that as long as an affiliate is "communications" related, the FCC has ruled that CPNI is under an opt-out approach (can be shared without your explicit permission). A phone company is permitted to sell all information on you, such as numbers you call, when you called them, where you were when you called them, or any other personally identifying information. CPNI would normally require a warrant for law enforcement agencies, but it can be freely sold to "communications" related companies. One can verify this by checking rule 64.2007(b)(1) and footnote 137 in the 2007 CPNI order. One can call up a phone company and opt out by requesting that they do not share CPNI information. In the case of

The U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996 granted the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authority to regulate how customer proprietary network information (CPNI) can be used and to enforce related consumer information privacy provisions. The rules in the 2007 FCC CPNI Order further restrict CPNI use and create new notification and reporting requirements. The rules in the 2007 CPNI Order include: Limits the information which carriers may provide to third-party marketing firms without first securing the affirmative consent of their customers Defines when and how customer service representatives may share call details Creates new notification and reporting obligations for carriers (including identity verification procedures) Verification process must MATCH what is shown with the company placing the call.

The biggest open secret in the financial world has been confirmed. Regulators in the UK, the US and Switzerland have announced massive fines for some of the world’s largest banks for a manipulation of global currency markets that in its callous ubiquity says so much about the banking behaviours that sparked the global financial crisis. Fines levied by the UK regulator add up to £1.1 billion. The US regulator announced fines of $1.4 billion. Banks hit by these fines include UBS, Citi, JP Morgan, HSBC and RBS. Barclays is yet to come to a settlement on the back of the investigations.

The probe uncovered individuals traders within large banks who were working together in trading clubs which had names you would expect from the “ruthless narcissists” on BBC TV show, The Apprentice. These included “the players”, “the 3 musketeers” and “1 team, 1 dream”. These clubs worked together to influence the WM Reuters 4pm fix – essentially the official number used to fix currency rates. It shapes everything from how much we pay for currency when we go overseas to how much our pension fund pays when it wants to buy into an offshore investment. This is one of the core numbers in global finance.

So, it sounds important, but why should we actually care? Well global currency markets are worth over £5 trillion a day. They are the world’s biggest financial market. More than 40% of the trade takes place in London, and more than half of this trade is dominated by just four players: Citi, Deutsche Bank, UBS and Barclays. A small percentage of the trade relates to buying actual things (such as a shipment of coffee or oil). Most of it is either purely speculative or part of the process buying other speculative financial instruments. According to one piece in the Financial Times, there are really only a hundred or so people who really matter in this market. About 30 of them have been either placed on gardening leave or have been fired from their position in the last year.

Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was sentenced to six years in prison and fined NIS 1 million in court in Tel Aviv on Tuesday morning for his role in the 'Holyland Affair', the real estate corruption case considered the largest of its kind in Israeli history.

The case marks the first time a prime minister was convicted of a felony and now, with his sentencing, the first time a former prime minister has ever been sentenced to jail time.

Additional sentencing included Hillel Cherney, who was the developer behind the Holyland project and was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison and fined NIS 2 million. Cherney was convicted of 19 offences of corruption and a slew of additional corruption and break of trust offences.   Danny Dankner, the former chairman of Israel's second-biggest bank, also received three years in jail during Tuesday's senctencing. Dankner, who is now the joint chairman of Israel Salt Industries, was also fined a million and half shekel.   Avigdor Kelner, also a developer in the project, who was convicted of two corruption charge in the affair, was sentenced to three years and fined NIS 1 million.   Former Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski, who succeeded Olmert as the city's mayor, and Dankner, were both charged and convicted of offering hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to a government official to rezone land for the project.

Gen. David Petraeus, once a widely celebrated military leader who oversaw operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and was touted as a potential presidential candidate, was sentenced to serve two years on probation and to pay an $100,000 fine on Thursday for sharing classified information with his biographer and lover, Paula Broadwell.

Yahoo reports that it is on the verge of releasing 1,500 pages of documents related to a long court battle over its participation in the PRISM program, a National Security Agency program revealed last summer as part of the Snowden leaks. A leaked top-secret slide about PRISM shows that Yahoo was one of the first participants, having begun contributing to the database in March of 2008. It did so under severe duress. Company executives believed the government's demand for data was "unconstitutional and overbroad" and fought it in court.

"Our challenge, and a later appeal in the case, did not succeed," explained Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell in a blog post published today. "The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)... ordered us to give the U.S. Government the user data it sought in the matter." After it lost, Yahoo was threatened with $250,000 per day fines if it didn't comply with the program. Not only that, but the government got permission to share the ruling with other companies in order to put pressure on them as well, according to a just-published story by The Washington Post.

Wells Fargo WFC -9.22%Wells FargoWFC$58.16$-5.91(-9.22%)As of 02/06/2018, 01:01am EST is facing far more than a fine for its fake accounts scandal, in which employees at the lender's branches across the country opened over a million fraudulent checking and credit card accounts to hit their numbers. Late on Friday, the Federal Reserve decided to restrict growth at America's third-largest bank by assets until its risk and governance is improved. The order, which also called for a revamp of Wells Fargo's board of directors, sent the bank reeling in early trading Monday. Wells Fargo shares plunged 9% lower in Monday trading, erasing most of its gains over the past 12 months. For its top shareholder, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, the Fed-inspired stock slide meant its Wells Fargo holdings lost over $2.7 billion in value. "We cannot tolerate pervasive and persistent misconduct at any bank and the consumers harmed by Wells Fargo expect that robust and comprehensive reforms will be put in place to make certain that the abuses do not occur again," said chair Janet L. Yellen on Friday. The order was her last as head of the Federal Reserve. On Monday, successor Jerome Powell was sworn in. Added Yellen, "the enforcement action we are taking today will ensure that Wells Fargo will not expand until it is able to do so safely and with the protections needed to manage all of its risks and protect its customers." In September 2016, Wells Fargo paid a $185 million fine to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after the agency found branch bankers had opened well over a million fake accounts, which generated millions of dollars in fees to the lender. When the scandal, which occurred over almost a decade, was first revealed, Wells Fargo and its board didn't immediately overhaul their leadership, or sanction top executives in the divisions where fake accounts were created. Only after significant public outcry, in addition to a widening scope of the scandal, did Wells Fargo begin a revamp, firing CEO John Stumpf and clawing back bonuses for numerous executives. Backer Warren Buffett later said in an appearance on CNBC the bank and its leadership had misjudged the severity of the problem.

In addition to harsh words, the Fed is ordering a sanction of almost unprecedented severity. It will restrict the bank's growth until its governance and risk management improve, though it will allow Wells to continue current operations from taking deposits to offering loans.

Three Wells Fargo long-standing board directors, John Chen, Lloyd Dean and Enrique Hernandez, will likely retire at the firm's annual meeting as part of the Fed's additional order for a refreshment of four board directors. Analysts did not brush off the Fed's move, as they have large fines coming out of the crisis.

France is giving Google three months to be more upfront about the data it collects from users — or be fined. Other European countries aren't far behind.

The French agency that regulates information technology says that five other European countries are taking similar steps in a staggered offensive against Google's privacy policy between now and the end of July. It says Google largely ignored earlier recommendations from European regulators.

Paris' formal warning gives the company three months to make changes to its privacy practices. They include specifying to users what it is using personal data for, and how long it's held. Regulators also want Google to let users opt out of having their data centralized — for example, when data from online searches, Gmail and YouTube are crunched into a single location.

The Justice Department is preparing to announce that Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and the Royal Bank of Scotland will collectively pay several billion dollars and plead guilty to criminal antitrust violations for rigging the price of foreign currencies, according to people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Most if not all of the pleas are expected to come from the banks’ holding companies, the people said — a first for Wall Street giants that until now have had only subsidiaries or their biggest banking units plead guilty.

The Justice Department is also preparing to resolve accusations of foreign currency misconduct at UBS. As part of that deal, prosecutors are taking the rare step of tearing up a 2012 nonprosecution agreement with the bank over the manipulation of benchmark interest rates, the people said, citing the bank’s foreign currency misconduct as a violation of the earlier agreement. UBS A.G., the banking unit that signed the 2012 nonprosecution agreement, is expected to plead guilty to the earlier charges and pay a fine that could be as high as $500 million rather than go to trial, the people said.

Holding companies, while appearing to be the most important entities at the banks, are in less jeopardy of suffering the consequences of guilty pleas. Some banks worried that a guilty plea by their biggest banking units, which hold licenses that enable them to operate branches and make loans, would be riskier, two of the people briefed on the matter said. The fear, they said, centered on whether state or federal regulators might revoke those licenses in response to the pleas. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Behind the scenes in Washington, the banks’ lawyers are also seeking assurances from federal regulators — including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Labor Department — that the banks will not be barred from certain business practices after the guilty pleas, the people said. While the S.E.C.’s five commissioners have not yet voted on the requests for waivers, which would allow the banks to conduct business as usual despite being felons, the people briefed on the matter expected a majority of commissioners to grant them.In reality, those accommodations render the plea deals, at least in part, an exercise in stagecraft. And while banks might prefer a deferred-prosecution agreement that suspends charges in exchange for fines and other concessions — or a nonprosecution deal like the one that UBS is on the verge of losing — the reputational blow of being a felon does not spell disaster.

Copies of messages sent to BP traders over the course of a year were provided to Bloomberg News by a person with access to the online conversations. The person, who redacted the names of banks sending the messages and dates of conversations, said they came from firms whose senior foreign-exchange traders belonged to a chat room called “The Cartel” that was set up by Usher and included dealers at JPMorgan, Citigroup Inc. (C), Barclays Plc and UBS Group AG. (UBSN) The information offered an insight into currency moves minutes, sometimes hours before they happened. The messages could drag the U.K.’s biggest energy company into a scandal that has enveloped 11 banks and led to more than 30 traders from London to Singapore losing or being suspended from their jobs. Last month six banks were fined $4.3 billion for passing along information about their clients and working together to rig foreign-exchange markets.

While there’s no evidence that any BP traders were members of the Cartel, Usher participated in at least one chat room with White, according to a person who has examined conversations that included both men. It couldn’t be determined from the messages reviewed by Bloomberg News who sent the information to BP or whether BP employees acted on any of the tips.

In the clubby, lightly regulated world of foreign exchange, traders passed around tips to their circle of trusted contacts like candy. The victims: mutual-fund investors, pensioners and day traders who took the other side of a transaction at a lower price than they would have if they had the same information. “The authorities have made it clear in the enforcement notices accompanying the recent fines that irrespective of whether specific markets are regulated, banks cannot have pockets of business where traders behave as if they’re dealing in the Wild West,” said Janine Alexander, a partner at law firm Collyer Bristow LLP in London who specializes in financial-services litigation. “Banks have a responsibility to preserve market integrity, and traders must consider the effect of their behavior on clients and the market as a whole.”

Not even we anticipated this particular "unintended consequence" as a result of the US multi-billion dollar fine on BNP (which France took very much to heart). Moments ago, in a lengthy interview given to French magazine Investir, none other than the governor of the French National Bank Christian Noyer and member of the ECB's governing board, said this stunner at the very end, via Bloomberg: NOYER: BNP CASE WILL ENCOURAGE ‘DIVERSIFICATION’ FROM DOLLAR Here is the full google translated segment:

Q. Doesn't the role of the dollar as an international currency create systemic risk?   Noyer: Beyond [the BNP] case, increased legal risks from the application of U.S. rules to all dollar transactions around the world will encourage a diversification from the dollar. BNP Paribas was the occasion for many observers to remember that there has been a number of sanctions and that there would certainly be others in the future. A movement to diversify the currencies used in international trade is inevitable. Trade between Europe and China does not need to use the dollar and may be read and fully paid in euros or renminbi. Walking towards a multipolar world is the natural monetary policy, since there are several major economic and monetary powerful ensembles. China has decided to develop the renminbi as a settlement currency. The Bank of France was behind the popular ECB-PBOC swap and we have just concluded a memorandum on the creation of a system of offshore renminbi clearing in Paris. We have very strong cooperation with the PBOC in this field. But these changes take time. We must not forget that it took decades after the United States became the world's largest economy for the dollar to replace the British pound as the first international currency. But the phenomenon of U.S. rules expanding to all USD-denominated transactions around the world can have an accelerating effect. In other words, the head of the French central bank, and ECB member, Christian Noyer, just issued a direct threat to the world's reserve currency (for now), the US Dollar.

Putting this whole episode in context: in an attempt to punish France for proceeding with the delivery of the Mistral amphibious warship to Russia, the US "punishes" BNP with a failed attempt at blackmail (recall that as Putin revealed, the BNP penalty was a used as a carrot to disincenticize France from concluding the Mistral transaction: had Hollande scrapped the deal, BNP would likely be slammed with a far lower fine, if any). Said blackmail attempt backfires horribly when as a result, the head of the French central bank makes it clear that not only is the US Dollar's reserve currency status not sacrosanct, but "the world" will now actively seek to avoid USD-transactions in order to escape the tentacle of global "pax Americana." And, the biggest irony of all is that in "punishing" France for dealing with Russia, that core country of the Eurasian alliance of Russia and China, the US merely accelerated the gravitation of France (and all of Europe) precisely toward Eurasia, toward a multi-polar (sorry fanatic believers in a one world SDR-based currency) and away from the greenback.