Thread by @sophie_e_hill

Ep 2 of "Suspicious Activity" (a podcast on the #FinCENFiles by @pineapplemedia and @BuzzFeedNews) recounts how George Osborne lobbied US regulators NOT to prosecute senior execs at HSBC...

podcasts.podinstall.com/pineapple-stre…

... which is a brilliant illustration of "structural power" as developed by folks like @PepperCulpepper and @RaphaelJReinke, as well as @Cornelia_Woll's "collective power of inaction".

Check out the podcast and then follow-up with some further reading from #polisci! (a 🧵)

Culpepper & Reinke (2014) use the idea of "structural power" to compare and contrast the UK and US bank bailouts in 2008.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.11…

In the US, all the big banks get the majority of their revenues domestically. But in the UK, there are banks like HSBC with huge market share that are truly *international* - this gives them "structural power" vis-à-vis the UK regulators.

@Cornelia_Woll's book "The Power of Inaction" offers a comparative case study of bank bailouts in the UK, Ireland, Denmark and Germany. She argues that banks are able to influence policymakers not just by what they *do*, but by what they *don't do*.

google.com/books/edition/…

"For governments everywhere, the participation and contribution of the financial industry to its own rescue was an implicit or explicit concern. The most unbalanced arrangements arose where the financial industry was capable of refusing to participate."

One factor that emerges from the podcast is the importance of internal corporate "culture". The team responsible for cleaning up HSBC's act was notorious for its regular cocaine + booze-fuelled benders

buzzfeednews.com/article/anthon…

Where does this corporate culture come from? There's a fascinating anecdote about this Woll's book: while HSBC UK near-singlehandedly scuppered the UK's bailout plan, HSBC France took part in the French bailout scheme even though it didn't formally sign the agreement!

The answer, Woll suggests, lies in the common culture shared by French government and banking elites, as well as the fact that HSBC France had a prior history as an independent French entity before being acquired by the megabank.

What's fascinating looking back on this literature is that the banks that managed to exert huge leverage over their regulators because they were relatively unaffected by the 2008 crisis – like Deutsche Bank and HSBC – are now some of the main culprits in the #FinCENFiles!

cc'ing @azeen @a_cormier_ @JasonLeopold @TomBWarren to say: it would be awesome to hear a conversation between investigative journalists and political scientists about the broader implications of the #FinCENFiles! maybe a 6th episode?? 🙏🙏🙏