Remember when a billion dollars was real money? Over the past couple of weeks there have been some mammoth fines paid by financial institutions for conduct, which would appear to fall under the category of “Banks Behaving Badly”. Last week HSBC agreed to pay a fine of $1.92 billion for its transgressions involving money laundering. UBS is in the final stages of negotiations to pay $1.5 billion to resolve allegations that it tried to rig interest rate benchmark (i.e. ‘Libor’) to boost trading profits. Finally, on December 10, coming in at a paltry $327 million are our old friends Standard Chartered, which admitted processing thousands of transactions for Iranian and Sudanese clients through its American subsidiaries; subsequently to avoid having Iranian transactions detected by the US Treasury Department computer filters, Standard Chartered deliberately removed names and other identifying information, according to the authorities. All in all, it’s not been a bad couple of weeks for the US Treasury, given the current stalemate over the ‘fiscal cliff’ and the need to reduce the US deficit.