Professor Roger McCormick, law professor at the London School of Economics, started researching bank fines as a one-off project two years ago but has now set up a permanent unit to track the fines. The total fines levied on the top 10 Western banks were £100b in 2013 and will ‘probably have risen towards £200bn’ for 2014, according to the Financial Times.

Bigger and bigger

‘The numbers are getting bigger and bigger,’ said Professor McCormick. An anonymous former European regulator is quoted as saying: ‘What is happening now is astonishing. If you had asked regulators a few years ago to predict how big the post-crisis penalties might be, our predictions would have been wrong – by digits.’

Capricious

Predictions are difficult to make because so many regulators are involved in the fining, on both sides of the Atlantic, and they are often working separately, rather than together. ‘The resulting pattern thus feels competitive – and capricious,’ says the newspaper. Source: The Financial Times