City Cuts All Ties With 5 Big Banks Over Corruption Charges

It’s hard being a big private bank these days. Ongoing awareness of the role that Goldman Sachs played in the Greek debt crisis; that Greek voters said no to Europe’s harsh austerity demands; recent revelations of unreasonably high fees and interest rates for lending to municipalities, and the role of big banks in the Baltimore crisis and Detroit bankruptcy all suggest that irresponsible finance ruins millions of lives.

And then there are the six banks that manipulated exchange rates between euros and dollars and manipulated LIBOR, which sets the “benchmark” for what banks charge one another.