re: #7 Cap’n Magic

HSBC had already disposed of a number of their US assets when the feces hit the rotating blades during the financial crises (they sold their Household Finance-based credit card arm to Capital One) and they are just eking by with their branch network in NY and miniscule holdings elsewhere. Had they been crimininally indicted, many US-based financial firms would have had the ability to pick up their assets for pennies on the dollar.

The problem is that HSBC is a global company and if it was convicted of a serious offense in the US it would also certainly lose its banking license in the UK, which would cause to fail completely. And if HSBC fails, the economic damage might well be bad enough to put the world economy back into recession. That’s what DoJ can’t act: Because of a political/economic calculation that the fallout from acting would be worse than the fallout from not acting.