Fed to Hammer Goldman Over Leak Case

Receiving Wide Coverage ...

Revolving door fallout: More bad news for Goldman Sachs. The Federal Reserve is preparing an enforcement action against the firm over a leak involving the central bank two years ago. The two men at the center of the case – a Fed employee, Jason Gross, and a Goldman Sachs banker, Rohit Bansal, who had previously worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Nwe York – have already pleaded guilty, while the bank itself paid a $50 million fine to New York State regulators.

But now the Fed is looking to get tough on the bank, while also examining a case against another Goldman employee, Joseph Jiampietro, who supervised the banker that received the confidential information. "The cases would reflect a broader effort at the Fed to address Wall Street misdeeds and ramp up its enforcement efforts against individual bankers," according to the New York Times, which first reported the story on Monday.

Bansal has already been barred from the industry, and now his boss might get the same treatment. The paper notes the Fed barred six bankers from the industry last year – up from three in 2014. The year before that it didn't ban anybody. The Wall Street Journal adds, "the leak was a black eye for the central bank because it raised fresh questions about the so-called revolving door between the regulator and Wall Street after much criticism in the wake of the financial crisis that the Fed was too lenient on big banks."

Wall Street Journal

5 years later: The paper profiles the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's consumer complaints portal, which has handled 930,000 complaints since its inception five years ago. Some critics charge the database contains inaccurate claims and fails to protect consumer privacy.

Quick turnaround: Fifth Third fired its general counsel, Heather Russell Koenig, last week, citing a conflict of interest. She joined the bank in September 2015.

New York Times

'Break up the banks': Columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin examines the "extremely odd political dovetail" of the campaign season: both Democrats and Republicans have now backed a plan to bring back the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banking activities.

Uphill battle: Convicting two HSBC bankers charged last week with front-running a large currency trade several years ago could prove challenging. The case will "depend on showing more than just questionable ethics in profiting off a client," the paper says. "Instead, the government will have to prove an agreement to effectively steal from the customer through deception, because fraud is a type of larceny."

Elsewhere ...

In low spirits: Bloomberg explores in detail whether the banking industry has "lost its mojo." Since the financial crisis, regulatory costs and legal fines have ballooned while jobs and pay are being slashed.