04 February 2008

France said to sugest new controls for its banks

I was wondering when the French would get around to this. I dont think the Societe Generale disaster can be called organised crime, but it does demonstrate a failure of mechanisms of fraud prevention and opens another area for researchers, namely the relationship between crime and business and the consequences of the mechanisms now in place within the banking system to alert the authorities to "suspicious transactions". The state has coopted the banks in its search for "terrorists" and organised criminality, yet the banks' response remains one of box-ticking rather than cultural change.
But do we want a world where bankers are police officers? Sounds like a finals question...

No comments: