The OCC's wrath is being vented on small national banks all over the country. More cops writing traffic tickets to the people driving to work while the real criminals are breaking into the homes of said tax paying workers.

Way to go guys, way to go.

I think we also have to remember that HSBC is a foreign bank. Only its U.S. branches or offices are subject to U.S. jurisdiction. Our regulators aren't really in a position to kill off the bank in such cases -- they can only kick them out of the U.S. (which would be a huge hit on HSBC, but not a death blow, IMO). And reaching management of the foreign bank can be impossible. Thus it's the stateside organization and employees who get the shaft.

If you can acess the article, Rolling Stone has quite an interesting take on this!

While I have no Sympathy for HSBC I also have no faith in the author of the article. He is just another hack looking to make a name for himself.

A little bit about the author of the rolling stone article

In March 2001, as editor of the magazine The eXile, Taibbi burst into the office of New York Times Moscow bureau chief Michael Wines and threw a cream pie spiked with horse semen into his face, after Taibbi's magazine had awarded Wines the title of "worst journalist" in Russia.[17]

In March 2005 Taibbi's satirical essay, "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope",[18] published in the New York Press was denounced by Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Matt Drudge, Abe Foxman, and Anthony Weiner. The editor who approved the column lost his job.[19] Taibbi defended the piece as an "off-the-cuff burlesque of truly tasteless jokes" written to give his readers a break from a long run of "fulminating political essays" of his. Taibbi also said he was surprised at the vehement reactions to what he wrote "in the waning hours of a Vicodin haze."[20]

Journalist James Verini, while interviewing Taibbi in a Manhattan restaurant for Vanity Fair, said Taibbi cursed and threw a coffee at him, and accosted him as he tried to get away, all in response to Verini's volunteered opinion that Taibbi's book, The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, was "redundant and discursive."[21] Taibbi later said the incident was "an aberration from how I've behaved in the last six or seven years."[22]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Taibbi

Trust me, I took it with a grain of salt, I just thought some of his points were spot on.