Dennis J. Shaughnessy
Analyst · Janie Montgomery Scott
Tobey, I don't have a crystal ball. Number one, I think it's hard to look at one bank and fine them hundreds of million of dollars and then look at the guys on the other side of the e-mail trail and not do something to them. So I just think that there is a quid pro quo that probably exists. I think Deutsche Bank came out with a statement, sort of saying, "Well, yeah, we know we have people in the company that didn't act right, but they're down low in the organization. It wasn't the top guys." So I think you're seeing banks, because they know this is all going to be discovered, start to fess up. I think -- I don't disagree the regulators don't want to weaken the banks anymore, but I think the real business for us is going to be on the civil litigation. I think Warren Buffett came out and said himself. He said, "I've owned, on or off, more than $1 billion of auction-rate preferreds in Berkshire Hathaway for the last 10 years." And he said, "If they've been mispriced by 0.25 point for 10 years, that's real money." So I think if you have big institutional investors that are buying paper that is priced off of what these guys do and as the governments do these investigations, what they find it doesn't tend to look better, it tends to look worse, and they tend to get a hold of some of these individuals and they get them to turn against their own companies and turn against the guys who are on the other side of the e-mail, chat or et cetera. So I don't think we pretend to understand how aggressively the governments want to go against the banks. I think now they're sort of locked in a corner where they have to, number one. And in Europe, this has become a big political football. So you do have a lot of political parties over there that are not bank friendly, that are sitting back and saying, "This is straw that broke the camel's back. These guys, we knew they were cheating and everything and now, they're cheating in one of the main things that prices investments." So I think the civil side of this could be big. A regulatory side, I think, will have some degree of parity with what we saw with Barclays, because I don't know how they're going to be able to do nothing to the other banks, especially when they've got e-mails where Barclays guys were talking to the other banks to collude on the rates.