Chris Blackhurst | Too Big to Jail

Iain Martin in conversation with the award-winning business writer and commentator Chris Blackhurst about his new book Too Big to Jail: Inside HSBC, the Mexican Drug Cartels and the Greatest Banking Scandal of the Century.

Too Big to Jail is an extraordinary story brilliantly told by the former editor of The Independent, Chris Blackhurst, that starts in Hong Kong and ranges across London, Washington, the Cayman Islands and Mexico, where HSBC saw the opportunity to become the largest bank in the world, and El Chapo seized the chance to fuel his murderous empire by laundering his drug proceeds through the bank.

It brings together an extraordinary cast of politicians, bankers, drug dealers, FBI officers and whistle-blowers, and asks what price does greed have? Whose job is it to police global finance? And why did not a single person go to prison for facilitating the murderous expansion of a global drug empire?

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[Live_your_Dreams_Everyday]

This story does seem old, but still very relevant. He is so right about double standards on jail-time of course.

[sohara....]

White-collar criminals. For some reason, we don't see them as *_"bad"_* in the same way we might think of a person who enters your house without permission and robs you. White-collar crime seems like an abstraction, and yet causes very real grief ... and can spill over into the other type if crime: burglary, street mugging, physical attack.