Banking

The Other Rogue Banks

The slow but steady weakening of bank regulation is continuing. Responding to legislation passed by Congress earlier this year, the Federal Reserve just voted to propose new rules for a group of banks that are large but not gigantic. Congress had called for a review of banks with assets between $100 billion and $250 billion but the Fed proposals would affect some larger ones as well. In all, 16 banks would enjoy loosened restraints.

Much of the commentary on banks focuses on mega-institutions such as Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo. These corporations have certainly done the most harm to the economy and whose demise would have the most dire consequences.

Yet the next tier of banks have their own track record of misconduct that argues against relaxed oversight. Some of these offenses relate directly to financial risk while others do not, but they all point to the need for more regulation rather than less. Here are examples taken from Violation Tracker.

U.S. Bancorp (total penalties in Violation Tracker: $1.2 billion): paid $453 million this year to settle Justice Department allegations that it had insufficient protections against money laundering and failed to file suspicious activity reports.

PNC Financial (total penalties: $472 million): in 2003 one of its subsidiaries paid $115 million to settle criminal charges of conspiring to violate securities laws (the deal included a deferred prosecution agreement).

Capital One (total penalties: $228 million): in 2012 one of its subsidiaries paid $165 million to settle Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) allegations that it deployed deceptive marketing tactics in its credit card business.

Charles Schwab (total penalties: $125 million): in 2011 it paid $118 million to settle SEC allegations that it made misleading statements to clients about one of its funds.

BB&T (total penalties: $93 million): in 2016 it paid $83 million to settle Justice Department allegations it knowingly originated mortgage loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration that did not meet applicable requirements.

SunTrust (total penalties: $1.5 billion): in 2014 it settled a case brought by the CFPB, the Department of Justice, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and attorneys general in 49 states and the District of Columbia alleging that it engaged in systemic mortgage servicing misconduct, including robo-signing and illegal foreclosure practices. The settlement required SunTrust to provide $500 million in loss-mitigation relief to underwater borrowers and pay $40 million to approximately 48,000 consumers who lost their homes to foreclosure.

American Express (total penalties: $350 million): in 2017 it paid $96 million to settle CFPB allegations of having discriminated against customers in Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories by charging higher credit card rates than in the 50 states.

Ally Financial (total penalties: $668 million): in 2012 it paid $207 million to settle Federal Reserve allegations of mortgage servicing violations.

The list goes on for the remainder of the 16 banks: Citizens Financial (total penalties: $137 million), Fifth Third Bancorp ($121 million), KeyCorp ($19 million), Regions Financial ($170 million), M&T Bank ($119 million), Huntington Bancshares ($14 million) and Discover Financial Services ($232 million).

It’s interesting that the only institution on the list with a small penalty total ($203,000) is Northern Trust, which caters to corporations and wealthy individuals rather than the general public. If all the banks similar records, then perhaps some measure of deregulation might be warranted.

Yet as long as the large banks are as ethically challenged as the giant ones, they should continue to face strict oversight.

The Persistence of Bank Misconduct

Ten years ago this month, the financial crisis erupted, and within a matter of weeks the banking landscape was transformed. Merrill Lynch was taken over by Bank of America. Lehman Brothers collapsed. AIG had to be bailed out by the federal government. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the last two independent investment houses, were forced to become bank holding companies subject to stricter regulation. JPMorgan Chase took over Washington Mutual. Congress was compelled to create the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.

What were the consequences of the widespread misconduct that caused the meltdown? Lehman turned out to be the only major institution to suffer the fate of liquidation. No top executives at any banks faced personal criminal or civil charges. The federal government sold off its holdings in the companies that were bailed out.

The most significant penalty was financial. According to data collected for Violation Tracker, banks were hit with a total of $89 billion in penalties relating to the issuance and sale of the toxic securities at the center of the crisis. More than $40 billion in penalties were imposed in related mortgage abuse cases.

While by some measures these penalties are significant, they are far less than the amount of harm the banks caused to the economy and the financial well-being of homeowners, workers and others. What is even more frustrating is that the billions in payments seem to have failed in their main purpose: discouraging banks from engaging in similar bad acts in the future.

We don’t have to wait to see if this is true. Even while they were still resolving cases stemming from the financial crisis, large banks were starting to engage in more wrongdoing.

Exhibit A is Wells Fargo, which is now more notorious for its behavior subsequent to the meltdown. It will forever be known as the bank that created millions of bogus accounts to generate illicit fees from its customers. Earlier this year, Wells was fined a total of $1 billion by the Officer of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That came after the Federal Reserve took the unprecedented step of barring the bank from growing any larger until it cleaned up its business practices.

Bank of America has also been accused of harming its customers. In 2014 the CFPB ordered the bank to provide $727 million in relief to credit card holders charged for deceptive add-on services. BofA’s Merrill Lynch unit has in recent years been fined repeatedly by regulators for a variety of improper practices. In June, for example, the SEC penalized Merrill $42 million for falsely telling brokerage customers that it had executed millions of orders internally when it had actually farmed them out to other firms.

Citigroup faced its own allegations of illegal credit card practices, and in 2015 it was ordered by the CFPB to provide $700 million in relief to customers. This year, in an unusually aggressive enforcement action by the Trump-controlled CFPB, Citi was ordered to pay $335 million in restitution to 1.75 million credit card customers for failing to properly adjust interest rates.

These abuses may not jeopardize the entire economy like those of the early 2000s, but they show that the big banks remain ethically challenged.

A Brazen Corporate Miscreant

The Justice Department and the federal regulatory agencies have been less than energetic in prosecuting corporate crime and misconduct lately, so it was interesting to see the DOJ announcement that it had gotten Wells Fargo to fork over $2 billion to resolve a case involving mortgage-backed securities.

Before thinking that the Trump Justice Department is getting tougher on business offenders, it is important to keep in mind that this is a holdover matter from the prosecution of the big banks by the Obama DOJ in the wake of the financial meltdown. Most of the other banks settled their toxic securities cases long ago.

Wells held out and has now been rewarded by the Trump DOJ with a settlement that is substantially smaller than the ones that preceded it. JPMorgan Chase settled for $13 billion in 2013 and Bank of America for $16 billion the following year.

If anything, Wells should have been forced to pay out more to penalize it for its resistance. Moreover, during the years since its competitors resolved their cases, a tsunami of negative revelations have occurred regarding the other misconduct of Wells.

In fact, it has almost seemed that Wells was in a contest with Volkswagen to be crowned the most brazen corporate miscreant. Nearly two years ago, the scandal erupted regarding the bank’s widespread practice of secretly opening vast numbers of unauthorized customer accounts in order to generate illicit fees (the number of bogus accounts would turn out to be several million). This was followed by a series of other allegations such as charging 800,000 car loan customers for insurance they did not need.

Earlier this year, the Federal Reserve took the unprecedented step of barring Wells Fargo from growing any larger until it cleaned up its business practices. The agency also announced that the bank had been pressured to replace four members of its board of directors.

The actions of Wells were so egregious that even Mick Mulvaney, who took over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with the aim of defanging it, agreed in April to have the agency join with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to fine the bank a total of $1 billion for selling unnecessary products to customers and other improper practices.

The recent misdeeds of Wells share characteristics with the behavior outlined in the DOJ’s case. The bank appears to have been just as systematic and shameless in its deceptive mortgage practices as it was in generating bogus accounts. It seems that Wells managed to incorporate fraud into its business model in a seamless manner.

If any defendant was undeserving of preferential treatment, Wells Fargo is it.

The Real Law and Order Solution

Large banks have paid out more than $87 billion in fines and settlements to resolve allegations about the sale of toxic securities in the period leading up to the financial meltdown a decade ago. Another $43 billion was paid out in connection with mortgage abuses.

It’s unclear whether these unprecedented penalties had any lasting deterrent effect. As has been made clear in the Wells Fargo scandal, bad bank behavior has hardly disappeared. And now the financial services industry is pushing to weaken the modest restrictions implemented under the Dodd-Frank Act.

Imagine how different things might be if the federal government had the tools and the inclination to hold top bank executives personally responsible for the reckless and fraudulent behavior of their institutions. What if, instead of making payouts that they regarded as a tolerable cost of doing business, financial CEOs found themselves behind bars?

This tantalizing prospect is made a bit more real in legislation recently introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren: The Ending Too Big to Jail Act.

One component of the bill would require top executives of banks with more than $10 billion in assets to certify annually that they have conducted due diligence and found no criminal conduct or civil fraud within their institution. This would make it easier to bring individual prosecutions when it turns out that such certifications were false.

Another portion of the bill would create a permanent investigative unit for financial crimes. Designed along the lines of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which brought successful cases against executives at smaller banks, it would be known as the Special Inspector General for Financial Institution Crime. Properly funded, this unit could take on expensive and complicated cases.

Finally, the bill would mandate judicial oversight of deferred prosecution agreements, or DPAs. Along with the failure to prosecute top executives, the Obama Justice Department also continued the dubious practice that started under Bush of making numerous deals with large corporations by which they escaped prosecution for their transgressions, on the condition that they paid a financial penalty and promised to end the offending behavior. Since 2003 about 140 DPAs have been created, along with a larger number of cases involving a variant, the non-prosecution agreement.

It is unclear how much effort the Justice Department put into enforcing the DPAs. Warren’s bill would give the courts the power to oversee compliance with these agreements. In fact, it would require courts to determine whether a proposed DPA is in the public interest.

Finally, the legislation would require the Justice Department to establish a searchable database of DPAs. Until that comes into existence, you can use Violation Tracker to find information on more than 300 DPAs and NPAs.

Warren’s bill would greatly advance the kind of law and order the country truly needs.

The Other Problem Banks

Bipartisanship has returned to Washington, thanks to the overwhelming desire of Republicans and quite a few Democrats to roll back portions of the Dodd-Frank Act. Ten years after the onset of the financial meltdown and seven years after the law went into effect, the relentless efforts of the banking lobby seem to be paying off.

The legislation, S.2155, is being sold as much needed relief for smaller banks that were supposedly treated unfairly by Dodd-Frank. Some adjustment to the law might make sense for very small banks, but the bill has evolved into something that will benefit larger institutions that still merit close scrutiny.

Using relief for community banks as a stalking horse, proponents of the bill have added provisions that will reduce the degree of supervision that would be exercised on banks with assets up to $250 billion. Those with assets between $50 billion and $100 billion would benefit the most.

The two dozen banks (listed in a Congressional Research Service report) that would be affected by these provisions are hardly mom and pop financial institutions. And while the most harm to the economy was done by the likes of Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, these mid-sized banks have records that are far from spotless.

Take the case of Credit Suisse, the Swiss bank whose U.S. operation has assets of about $215 billion. During the final days of the Obama Administration it had to pay $5.3 billion to settle a case involving the sale of toxic securities a decade ago. In 2014 it paid $1.8 billion in connection with criminal charges of helping U.S. taxpayers file false returns. In 2009 it paid $268 million to settle criminal allegations relating to economic sanctions. In all, Credit Suisse has more than $9 billion documented in Violation Tracker, ranking it tenth among all corporations.

Or consider Barclays, the British bank whose U.S. operation has assets of about $180 billion. In 2015 it pled guilty to criminal charges of conspiring to manipulate foreign exchange markets and was fined $710 million while also paying $400 million to settle related civil allegations. That same year it had to pay $325 million to settle a case brought by the National Credit Union Administration concerning Barclay’s sale of toxic securities a decade earlier. Its Violation Tracker total is more than $3 billion, putting it in nineteenth place among all corporations.

Other controversial foreign banks whose U.S. subsidiaries would benefit from S.2155 relaxed regulation include Deutsche Bank ($12 billion in Violation Tracker), BNP Paribas ($9 billion) and UBS ($5 billion).

Foreign banks are not the only bad actors on the list. Atlanta-based SunTrust, with about $200 billion in assets, has racked up more than $1.5 billion in penalties, including one case in which it had to provide $500 million in relief to underwater borrowers to resolve allegations that it engaged in deceptive and illegal mortgage servicing practices. Among the other items in its rap sheet is a $21 million payment to resolve allegations that it charged higher loan rates to black and Latino borrowers.

The S.2155 beneficiary list includes half a dozen additional domestic banks with $100 million or more in penalties: Ally Financial, American Express, Discover Financial Services, Fifth Third Bancorp, M&T Bank Corporation, and Regions Financial Corporation.

A bank does not have to be gigantic to be problematic. These culprits should not lumped together with community banks in deciding whether to tinker with Dodd-Frank.

Stopping the Growth of Rogue Corporations

The federal response to corporate misconduct over the past two decades has alternated between tougher monetary penalties and the promotion of voluntary measures to lure companies into behaving better. Neither has worked very well.

Companies came to saw the increased fines as a tolerable cost of doing business (especially when they were tax deductible), while voluntarism was never a match for corporate greed.

It was thus intriguing when the Federal Reserve recently adopted a new approach in dealing with Wells Fargo. That bank, of course, has become notorious for its brazen scheme of creating millions of accounts not requested by customers, in order to generate illicit fees. It paid a fine of $100 million, with a lot more expected to follow. This came after a series of other scandals, including mortgage abuses that resulted in a $5.3 billion settlement in 2012.

The Fed, on Chair Janet Yellen’s final working day in office, issued an unusually blunt press release saying that the board was taking steps in response to “widespread consumer abuses and other compliance breakdowns” at Wells.

In an unprecedented step, the Fed imposed a restriction on the bank’s ability to grow “until it sufficiently improves its governance and controls.” In an industry for which getting larger is the guiding principle, Wells will feel intense pressure to satisfy the Fed’s demands. In fact, concurrently with the Fed’s action Wells announced that it would replace one-quarter of its 16-person board of directors by the end of the year.

Bank-friendly politicians have not had much to say about the Fed’s action, but it is clear that the restriction placed on Wells represents a forceful rebuttal to those pressing for a weakening of financial industry regulation. The ouster of Yellen by President Trump was a coup for the deregulation crowd, but we can take some solace in reports that her successor Jerome Powell oversaw the Fed’s negotiations with Wells.

The Fed’s action should be promoted as an example of how regulatory agencies and the Justice Department need to get more creative in dealing with egregious and repeat violators. Rogue corporations will only change their behavior if the penalties really sting.

The restriction on growth begins to meet this requirement because it makes Wells more vulnerable. An inability to become larger through acquisitions means that the bank will lose ground to its big competitors. Wells is probably too big to be a potential takeover target itself, but it could come under pressure from activist investors to restructure or even sell off portions of itself.

Moreover, the restrictions will probably depress the bank’s stock price, and that will be felt personally by the executives who encouraged or overlooked the misconduct.

At the same time, the house-cleaning among directors is an important message to send to board members at other misbehaving companies. That message would be even more effective if directors are not just removed but held personally liable for allowing the corrupt practices to happen.

The Fed has not always been the most aggressive of regulators. Let’s hope its action on Wells inspires other agencies to get tougher with corporate miscreants.

The Corporate Death Penalty for Wells Fargo?

Wells Fargo’s seemingly endless transgressions have reached the point that there is growing discussion of a possibility rarely considered even in some of the most egregious corporate scandals: putting it out of business.

Rep. Maxine Waters, the top ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, recently issued a report that recounted the banks sins (including a reference to the $11 billion Violation Tracker tally of its penalties), saying that Wells has “demonstrated a pattern of egregiously harming its customers.”

Such statements have been heard frequently since the Wells bogus account scandal came to light last year. But Waters goes on to argue: “When a megabank has engaged in a pattern of extensive violations of law that harms millions of consumers, like Wells Fargo has, it should not be allowed to continue to operate within our nation’s banking system, and avail itself of all of the associated privileges afforded to it.”

A similar sentiment is expressed in a letter just submitted to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency by the AFL-CIO, Americans for Financial Reform and five other groups. The letter asks the OCC to consider whether, “in light of the bank’s pattern of law breaking,” the bank “should forfeit its national banking charter.”

The issue was even brought up in a recent Congressional hearing in which Wells CEO Tim Sloan was being grilled by members of the Senate Banking Committee. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that Sloan should be fired, while Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii went further by asking Sloan: “Why shouldn’t the OCC revoke your charter?”

“We serve one out of every three Americans, we have 270,000 team members,” Sloan responded before Schatz cut him off, saying: “So, you’re too big.”

Those comments encapsulate how a debate about the possible shutdown of a bank or other company as large as Wells Fargo would play out. The corporation would emphasize the disruptive effect on its customers and employees, suggesting they would be the unintended victims. Of course, in the case of Wells it was the bank itself that victimized customers and staff.

Schatz’s comment points to the direction any serious effort to penalize a rogue corporation should take: the emphasis should not be a precipitous shutdown but rather a breakup into smaller entities that would be subjected to rigorous regulation and scrutiny. Care should be taken in the process to protect the interests of customers and employees, though upper level executives should be shown the door.

Discussions of the corporate death penalty have come and gone over the years. The need to deal with a brazen recidivist such as Wells may finally bring more serious consideration to a tool that could be more effective than billions in penalties in ending the ongoing corporate crime wave.

Federal Watchdog Agencies Still On Guard

Donald Trump likes to give the impression that he has made great strides in dismantling regulation. While there is no doubt that his administration and Republican allies in Congress are targeting many important safeguards for consumers and workers, the good news is that those protections in many respects are still alive and well.

This conclusion emerges from the data I have been collecting for an update of Violation Tracker that will be posted later this month. As a preview of that update, here are some examples of federal agencies that are still vigorously pursuing their mission of protecting the public.

Federal Trade Commission. In June the FTC, with the help of the Justice Department, prevailed in litigation against Dish Network over millions of illegal sales calls made to consumers in violation of Do Not Call regulations. The satellite TV provider was hit with $280 million in penalties.

Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA is a regulatory entity as well as a law enforcement agency. In July it announced that Mallinckrodt, one of the largest manufacturers of generic oxycodone, had agreed to pay $35 million to settle allegations that it violated the Controlled Substances Act by failing to detect and report suspicious bulk orders of the drug.

Federal Reserve. The Fed continues to take action against both domestic and foreign banks that fail to exercise adequate controls over their foreign exchange trading, in the wake of a series of scandals about manipulation of that market. The Fed imposed a fine of $136 million on Germany’s Deutsche Bank and $246 million on France’s BNP Paribas.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Last month the beleaguered CFPB ordered American Express to pay $95 million in redress to cardholders in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands for discriminatory practices against certain consumers with Spanish-language preferences.

Securities and Exchange Commission. In May the SEC announced that Barclays Capital would pay $97 million in reimbursements to customers who had been overcharged on mutual fund fees.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC announced that the Texas Roadhouse restaurant chain would pay $12 million to settle allegations that it discriminated against older employees by denying them front-of-the-house positions such as hosts, servers and bartenders.

Justice Department Antitrust Division. The DOJ announced that Nichicon Corporation would pay $42 million to resolve criminal price-fixing charges involving electrolytic capacitors.

Federal agencies are also finishing up cases dating back to the financial meltdown. For example, in July the Federal Housing Finance Agency said that it had reached a settlement under which the Royal Bank of Scotland will pay $5.5 billion to settle litigation relating to the sale of toxic securities to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And the National Credit Union Administration said that UBS would pay $445 million to resolve a similar case.

It remains to be seen whether federal watchdogs can continue to pursue these kinds of cases, but for now they are not letting talk of deregulation prevent them from doing their job.

Note: The new version of Violation Tracker will also include an additional ten years of coverage back to 2000.

Corporate America Doesn’t Qualify for Moral Leadership Either

It may turn out that Donald Trump’s greatest contribution to American business is allowing the chief executives of tainted corporations to take a morally superior posture toward a presidency that seems to be completely devoid of principle. Their brands are boosted as his becomes increasingly toxic.

It is a good thing that big business is taking steps to separate itself from Trump. The collapse of the two advisory councils is not only a rebuke to Trump’s offensive comments on the events in Charlottesville but also an overdue retreat from entities that were set up mainly to foster the illusion that this administration is taking serious steps to reform the economy.

Yet it is dismaying that the moral vacuum created by Trump is being filled by the likes of Walmart chief executive Douglas McMillon, who got himself featured on the front page of the New York Times for a statement criticizing Trump.

For years the giant retailer was a national symbol of discriminatory practices. In 2009 it had to pay $17.5 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that it discriminated against African-Americans in the recruitment and hiring of truck drivers. The company was also widely accusing of gender discrimination. In 2010 the company was required to pay $11.7 million to settle a case brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and it was facing potential damages in the billions from a class action suit brought on behalf of more than 1 million female employees until the Supreme Court came to its rescue and threw out the case for what amounted to technical reasons.

In addition to discrimination, Walmart has been at the center of countless controversies involved wage theft, union-busting, tax avoidance, bribery and much more.

After Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier led the way among business critics of Trump’s embrace of white nationalism, the president struck back with a tweet referring to “ripoff drug prices.” While Trump was just being vindictive, it’s true that Merck’s reputation is far from untarnished.

In 2011 the drugmaker agreed to pay a $321 million criminal fine and a $628 million civil settlement to resolve allegations that it illegally promoted and marketed the painkiller Vioxx. This came after Merck had to remove the drug from the market in the wake of reports that the company for years covered up evidence of serious safety issues surrounding its blockbuster product. This is just one of a long list of its cases involving illegal marketing, overbilling, false claims and anti-competitive practices.

Another of the CEOs who spoke out in response to Trump’s comments was JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon. Earlier this year, the bank had to pay $53 million to settle a case brought by the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan accusing it of engaging in discrimination on the basis of race and national origin in its mortgage business.

JPMorgan Chase was one of the parties that helped bring about the financial collapse of a decade ago, and in 2013 it agreed to a $13 billion settlement of federal and state allegations relating to the packaging and sale of toxic mortgage-backed securities.

In 2015 JPMorgan had to pay a $550 million criminal fine to resolve federal charges that it and other large banks conspired to manipulate foreign exchange markets. There are many more entries in the corporate rap sheet of this company, which since the beginning of 2010 has had to pay out more than $28 billion in fines and settlements.

It would be difficult to find any members of the disbanded advisory councils whose companies have not engaged in serious misconduct of one sort or another.

Such is the peril of looking for paradigms of virtue in the business world. Corporate executives should, along with many others, speak out against Trump’s reprehensible comments, but they cannot lay claim to moral leadership.

The Other Trump Collusion Scandal

For months the news has been filled with reports of suspicious meetings between Trump associates and Russian officials. Another category of meetings also deserves closer scrutiny: the encounters between Trump himself and top executives of scores of major corporations since Election Day. What do these companies want from the new administration?

During the presidential campaign, Trump often hinted that he would be tough on corporate misconduct — especially the offshoring of jobs — and this won him a significant number of votes. After taking office, however, much of the economic populism has disappeared in favor of a shamelessly pro-corporate approach, especially when it comes to regulation. Big business has put aside whatever misgivings it had about Trump and now seeks favors from him.

There is always a fine line between deregulation and the encouragement of corporate crime and misconduct. We should be concerned about the latter, given the roster of executives who have made pilgrimages to the White House.

Public Citizen has just published a report looking at the track record of the roughly 120 companies whose executives have met publicly with Trump since November 8 and finds that many of them “are far from upstanding corporate citizens.”

Using data from Violation Tracker (which I and my colleagues produce at the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First), Public Citizen finds that more than 100 of the visitors were from companies that appear in the database as having paid a federal fine or settlement since the beginning of 2010.

In its tally of these penalties, which includes those associated with companies such as Goldman Sachs and Exxon Mobil whose executives were brought right into the administration, Public Citizen finds that the total is about $90 billion.

At the top of the list are companies from the two sectors that have been at the forefront of the corporate crime wave of recent years: banks and automakers. JPMorgan Chase, with penalties of almost $29 billion, is in first place. Also in the top dozen are Citigroup ($15 billion), Goldman Sachs ($9 billion), HSBC ($4 billion) and BNY Mellon ($741 million). Volkswagen, still embroiled in the emissions cheating scandal, has the second highest penalty total ($19 billion). Two other automakers make the dirty dozen: Toyota ($1.3 billion) and General Motors ($936 million).

The rest of the dirty dozen are companies from another notorious industry: pharmaceuticals. These include Johnson & Johnson ($2.5 billion), Merck ($957 million), Novartis ($938 million) and Amgen ($786 million).

All these companies have a lot to gain from a relaxation of federal oversight of their operations. While it remains unclear whether the Trump campaign used its meetings with Russian officials to plan election collusion, there is no doubt that the administration has been using its meetings with corporate executives to plan regulatory rollbacks that will have disastrous financial, safety and health consequences.