61–70 of 417 posts
HSBC DOING SHADY SHIT? Business as usual, remember when they took in all that drug cartel money? They shouldn't exist.
HSBC was created to deal with opium money following the opium wars because other banks would not.
Agree so, there shoupd have been a bunch of jail sentences for laundering cartel money. But then financial crimes at that scale rarely get punished.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blaming foreign investors for a housing crisis is a smokescreen. It's not the demand from investors that's the issue; it's the government's stifling regulations that choke new construction. The mess is because of state failure, not market failure. When sellers freely sell their homes to foreign buyers, they're making choices that benefit them. Why should we deny them that right? The real absurdity is ignoring the ele…
Yup. The Power of Pricing is a thing that exists whether you want it to or not. Smart policy uses it to great advantage. Dumb policy redirects this to hurt those it intends to help. Rent control, restrictions on production, byzantine zoning and construction rules... all contribute to distorting the market in ways that push back on the original (or at least, stated) intentions. You want housing to be cheaper? Increase…
IANAFinancialInvestigator, but skimming through it sounds like: 1. Fraudulent applicants come to the bank with crazy stories to ask for enormous loans/mortgages toward a Toronto house, allegedly to turn hyper-suspicious big piles of cash into a more reputable-looking asset. 2. HSBC goes along with that because they want to suckle on the sweet regular payments of suspicious cash, even though they ought to damn well kn…
A lot of it doesn’t even sound like money laundering, just fraud. You say you have a job paying you lots of money from China, verification is loose, you get the loans, and then try to make mortgage payments via Airbnb. The risk is mostly with the bank, and if it doesn’t blow up you make all the money.
HSBC funneled $1B (that we know about) for cartels, it came out as 100% knowingly committed, and no one went to jail. Basically the government asked for their cut. Why wouldn't do they this again and again? They are above the law, they are the law.
"The government asked for their cut" actually means that for laundering that $881 million in cartel money - they were fined $1.9 billion and then had to pay an additional $665 million in other civil penalties. They wouldn't do it again and again because they don't earn $880 million when accepting $880 million in dirty money - remember that bank deposits are liabilities to the bank - they only earn money from interest…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It could be real Chinese income backed by fake paper work (money laundering) or fake income backed by fake paper work (fraud). You can take out $50k per year, a lot more via exemptions, so you don’t need money laundering to get money out of china into the USA (I had to move a few hundred K before, all the paper work was legit).
I presume you were foreign national with more options. Options for diasphora Chinese, many who illegally hold dual citizenship and relies on PRC nationality to do transactions/capital flight in PRC is different. I highlighted the original quote where branch is mostly Chinese-Canadian for context. Aurora is 20% Chinese, it's a big diasphora neighbourhood. There isn't some big "fake chinese income" conspiracy, it's the…
I’m not really sure what is happening among the rich, but among the middle class, it isn’t so much money laundering but having lots of savings with no good investment options, or just wanting to make money while someone else takes on the risk. They don’t have access to money that needs laundering.
HSBC soon to be RBC. This is not very surprising, a lot of this also gets facilitated by the independent mortgage brokers who get ppl through the system with some 'creative coaching'.
Lol no. HSBC has always had a much worse reputation than RBC, or any other bank for that matter. HSBC and Standard Chartered are amongst the worst international offenders when it comes to fraud and money laundering.
It's quite bizarre any jurisdiction would allow someone to buy housing there when they can't legally live in it.