On May 21, shareholders of JPMorgan Chase will have the opportunity to express their views of the Chairman/CEO of the mega-bank, and PR people have been filling the inboxes of every possible media outlet. They even got to the New York Post which ran an Op-Ed by Charlie Gasparino on Dimon’s bad feeling about splitting the roles of Chairman of the Board and Chief Operating Office.

After a global financial crisis, an epic price fixing scandal, and embarrassing criminal conduct British regulators are considering ending Too Big To Fail Banking. British Finance Minister George Osborne has proposed legislation that if banks do not shield their riskier investment activities from day to day banking they will face restructuring.

In the days before Thursday’s start to the trial for alleged Portland Christmas Tree bomber Mohamed Osman Mohamud, pre-trial hearings revealed two new details. First, the government failed to reveal to the defense an effort to “pitch” Mohamud on October 27, 2009, 13 months before they arrested him in an FBI-created plot. This comes on top of earlier revelations about a key meeting the FBI failed to tape, another failure to reveal FBI contacts, and Abu Zubaydah’s brother’s claim that, as an FBI informant, he was asked to track the then-16 year old Mohamud as early as 2008.

Where is Patrick Leahy on this? He has made no public statement on the HSBC case, despite being the co-author of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act, which was supposed to deliver funds toward prosecuting fraudulent big bank activity (it never actually did). Grassley, a co-author, has spoken out. Why not Leahy?

You don’t have to be a big fan of the drug war to suggest that extending a helping hand to murderous gangs is probably not activity an allegedly reputable bank should be involved in.

Maybe I was too blasé about the federal government letting HSBC off the hook; certainly the story has effectively shown how Too Big to Fail continues to be the watchword of the financial regulatory community. My pet theory here is actually that, because practically every mega-bank engaged in this same type of money laundering for drug cartels and countries under sanction – all of the big four in the US, including Wells Fargo (who admitted it in court), Bank of America, Citi and JPMorgan Chase – if they threw the book at HSBC, they would have to do the same to everyone else. So we’ve migrated from Too Big to Fail to Too Caught Up In The Same Criminality to Fail.

Yesterday was “bust British banks for money laundering” day in America, if you didn’t know. (It’s on the calendar.) First, the Treasury Department and other federal regulators – the US Attorney’s Office for DC, two divisions of the main Justice Department and even “orders involving the Board of Governors with the cooperation of the UK’s Financial Services Authority” – settled with Standard Chartered Bank for $327 million over various money laundering of funds from Iran and other countries under US sanctions.

Several weeks back, Standard Chartered Bank, caught engaging in multiple acts of money laundering, settled with the New York Department of Financial Services for $340 million. At the time I wrote that if the Treasury Department and the other federal regulators cannot get as much from Standard Chartered as the DFS, “it will be completely embarrassing.”

Apparently, Treasury is so in the tank for the banking industry that they have no problem going the embarrassing route.

I think what we’ve learned by now is that every international bank in the world may have violated US anti-money laundering guidelines, specifically when it came to doing business with countries barred by sanctions. Royal Bank of Scotland is only the latest, and you can add it to the growing list of firms we know engaged in this, including Standard Chartered, Wells Fargo, Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Germany’s Commerzbank, Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Holland’s ING Direct and more.

Benjamin Lawsky’s impertinent insistence that Standard Chartered Bank actually did something wrong when it facilitated $250 billion in money laundering has really scrambled the federal regulatory response to similar charges. Because the dirty secret is that practically EVERY big bank may have engaged in similar behavior. And now the regulators, embarrassed into action by Lawsky, have to do their job. The latest target is Deutsche Bank, but note the reference to “several other global banks” in the story.