The banks are in trouble now.

Anyone with a brain can tell that tons of illegal shit is going on within the walls of all global banks.  All you have to do is look at the profits they have been making these past 50 years.  Bankers are now richer than everyone somehow.  People who actually work very hard for a living producing something, like farmers and US manufacturers, are struggling.  But the banks are rolling in the dough.  What are essentially administrators and book keepers are now standing at the top of the heap.

This, I assure you, is not normal.  Banking is supposed to be and historically has been a very conservative affair.  What was true in the past will become true again in the future even if nobody understands how it can possibly come about.

But I'm telling it in real time' I'm explaining it with examples.  Their dominance came over time and by degree and their cycle back down the food chain will occur the same way, except faster.  On the way up what happened was that a system developed whereby illegal activity was papered over with corporate bribes to government and likely to government officials.  This allowed banks to profit handsomely from the illegal activity of its operators AKA employees.  When an employee would get caught doing something, the bank would whisk him out of the limelight and replace him with a lawyer. The bank would then provide umbrella protection with a shower of money.  The bank would then admit no wrongdoing for the record but would pay a fat fine.

But as conservative ideals begin to take hold, fewer people live on debt and that means less profits for banks who in turn have less money for payoffs and bribes.  They don't tell their operators about this of course because they want them to continue stretching the limits of the law in search of profits.  The operators assume they will be shielded like before.  But the policy change at the top is eventually disclosed with actions like we see in the news today where UBS actually ratted out their own operator for his illegal and fraudulent behavior.  The upper ranks probably saw the operators cross a line which would eventually be caught anyway with the new scrutiny and so so they threw the operator under the bus by "self reporting" the viloation (AKA ratting him out).

So for the moment these banks saved themselves a bit of money in the fines, all of which were in the chump change few million dollar range.  But they have also sent a huge signal out to their operators by doing this which is that the party is over.  You no longer have to be careful that your scam is not picked up by the feds (who are now suddenly doing their jobs again), you also have to watch out for your boss.  That is just too much risk for most players and so they will stop the games that made them so much money.  This will certainly show up in the bottom line of the banks in the next couple quarters.