Canada’s second largest bank may have just seen its tiny money laundering problem turn into a big one. TD, also the sixth largest bank in North America, recently disclosed they’ll be setting aside hundreds of millions in funds for any potential fines related to an anti-money laundering (AML) compliance investigation in the U.S.. After a […]
Not quite so simple. Converting to USD:
TD has a 5.37% dividend yield, a market cap of 134.46B, and $8.498B in profit.
Doing the math, their earnings are 6.32% of capitalization. They have less than 1% slack in their earnings yield after dividends. That works out to about $1¼B per year in free cashflow. So a $2B fine is roughly 2 years of capital accumulation; a big setback for sure!
Counterpoint: a very large fraction of the population is one unexpected bill away from insolvency. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to impose a similar fear on corporations for actual criminal activity.
Yes, that’s me saying that a corporation breaking the law should have to legitimately consider closing it’s doors. In some cases, forced closure should be part of the actual penalty.
I don’t see that as a counterpoint. I think it’s reasonable that banks (and corporations, in general) are fined significantly for regulatory violations.
With regulatory capture, most regulations are weak to begin with. And if they don’t have teeth, then they’re entirely pointless.
Two years of free cashflow is a good fine for serious violations of ethics/regulations, imho. I don’t think they’re getting off lightly with that, though; it’s a significant enough fine that they’re incentivized to do better and, even better, acts as a warning shot across the entire industry.
My (counter) point was that much lesser crimes committed by an individual would have completely destroyed the life of the perpetrator and probably their family. Yet high fives all around when a corporation has to put up with a couple of years of lost growth just because a number is too big for an individual to properly comprehend.