Dougan took over Credit Suisse in 2007, just in time to catch the worst global financial crisis in decades.

Last year Swiss lawmakers started pressuring him to resign after the bank plead guilty to helping clients evade taxes. The $2.6 billion fine the bank had to pay resulted in its first quarterly loss since 2008.

Pressure was mounting on Dougan from inside the bank too. After he testified on Capitol Hill about the tax evasion matter, a staff group representing Swiss bankers at Credit Suisse and other Swiss banks demanded that he apologize. They said Dougan’s testimony simply served to “vilify lots of employees that had nothing to do with offshore U.S. banking.”

Who knew what and when has been a continuig question in the investigation of banks, money laundering and aiding and abetting income tax evasion.  It is probable that the Department of Justice, the SEC, IRS and White House did not want to force an American banking CEO to plead guilty to criminal activities.

The Senate Committee on Investigations and a posse of legislators in the House and Senate kept insisting that top brass be brought to justice..  It is probable that a foreign bank was picked to take the rap.

Brady Dugan has claimed to have no knowledge of the schemes to aid and abet tax evasion.

When Maxine Waters insisted that the Department of Labor hold hearings on a Credit Suisse exemption from their criminal plea, evidence was submitted that Dougan did in fact know all about these schemes.  Pressure brought by the Labor Department hearing, the outcome of which has not yet been announced, may well have forced his resignation.

Credit Suisse wants the 2 billion US pension business it has been handling.  Proof that Credit Suisse had put aside its “culture of corruption” may have forced Dougan to step down.

It will be interesting to see if the exemption is now granted to Credit Suisse, and the reasons for which it is granted.  Clearly talk has been flying from the DOJ to the White House to the SEC.

The nation’s 31 largest banks stand to shed close to half a trillion dollars if the economy slumped into a deep depression, the Federal Reserve said Thursday.

But the banks — which include Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs — appear better positioned than ever to handle such loss, Fed data show.

Indeed, for the first time since the Fed began conducting its “stress tests” on banks with more than $50 billion in assets, not one fell below the Fed’s capital requirements, according to the first phase of the Fed’s stress test results released Thursday.

That places the nation’s biggest banks in a better position to pass the next phase of the Fed’s stress testing, which will determine which lenders may proceed with plans to return capital to investors. Final grades will be doled out Wednesday.

The Fed said the nation’s 31 largest banks would lose $490 billion in the 27 months ending October 2016 if the economy was rocked by what it called “severely adverse” conditions.

Those would include a 10% unemployment rate, a 25% drop in housing prices, a stock market plunge of nearly 60% and “a notable rise in market volatility.”

But banks have been steadily building their capital reserves to protect against losses due to stiffer requirements from the Fed, which is seeking to avoid further taxpayer funded bailouts like those made during the mortgage meltdown.

Under the Fed’s worst case scenario, the 31 firms tested would see their common capital ratios, which compare high-quality capital to risky assets, fall from 11.9% in the third quarter of 2014 to 8.2%.

That compares to aggregate capital ratios of 5.5% in the beginning of 2009, and 7.6% last year.

“It means our banking sector is pretty healthy right now from the perspective how how much money they are holding,” said Anna Krayn, head of stress testing for Moody’s Analytics. “Some would argue that there’s excess capital in the system,” she said.

Thursday’s results are just the first phase in the Fed’s stress testing process. On Wednesday, the Fed will announce whether any of the 31 banks still need to rein in capital spending plans.

Last year, Citigroup, Royal Bank of Scotland Group, HSBC Holdings and Banco Santander passed the Fed’s initial capital hurdle, but still fell short of complete success after the Fed determined that the quality of their processes, including their ability to assess risk, wasn’t good enough.

Another fail for Citigroup, the largest of the big banks to fail the test twice, will put pressure on CEO Michael Corbat whose success may be measured by Citi’s performance.

The real question is: are these stress tests and adequate measure of capacity to take a hit.

Antonio Weiss was recently in line to receive a $20 million bonus from his investment-bank employer for agreeing to take a Treasury Department undersecretary position. Weiss, who eventually took an advisory job that did not require Senate confirmation, is only the latest in a series of would-be and actual public officials who have stood to benefit from these “golden parachute” deals.

But why? If you go into government, you’re supposed to work for the public, not for Wall Street. Why is it in the interests of a bank or its shareholders to reward top executives – those who make millions of dollars a year because of all they presumably do for their employers — to leave? If the bank is motivated by something other than a desire to wield inappropriate influence on newly minted government officials, what is that motivation? This seems like a very fair question for shareholders to ask.

The AFL-CIO recently filed proposals to let big-bank shareholders demand greater transparency around these practices.  The banks’ reaction?  Panic.  They’re working as we speak to persuade the Securities and Exchange Commission to step in, allowing them to keep their policies a secret and their shareholders in the dark.

When bankers get large bonuses for taking government jobs, it sends a dangerous message about who is really calling the shots. If the big banks think these practices are defensible, they should defend them in the light of day.  They should let their shareholders know the facts and judge for themselves.  But if these policies are so indefensible that Wall Street needs to keep them a secret, that should tell shareholders and the public all they need to know.

Matt Levine brikskly sums it up:

Rough day for Royal Bank of Scotland.  RBS last posted net income back  when just about anyone could post net income; since then, counting today’s 3.5 billion pound ($5.4 billion) net loss for 2014, the total losses come to just under 50 billion pounds. That’s more than 9,000 pounds for every man, woman and child in Scotland. It’s more than Bank of America has paid in mortgage settlements.  At some point, if you were RBS’s managers or its owners (mostly the U.K. government), wouldn’t you start thinking it might not be worth it to keep going?

A very bank-y thing about RBS is that, after seven years of multi-billion-pound losses, management’s focus is on share repurchases: “By the time we get to 2016, we hope to have satisfied the preconditions we think are needed in order to start a discussion” with regulators about dividends or share repurchases, says the chief financial officer. I feel like the regular-company model is, if you make a lot of money, you give it back to shareholders; if not, not so much. The RBS model is more like: We are losing so much of your money, you shouldn’t trust us with it, here, you take it back. Capital requirements make this difficult, but if RBS can shrink its assets faster than it loses money, it stands a chance.

And for Standard Chartered. StanChart’s board rather surprisingly parted ways with its chief executive officer, Peter Sands, and replaced him with former JPMorgan banker

The chairman is also leaving. “With the share price having about halved since its March 2013 peak, the stock market was looking for a fresh start.

And for HSBC.  HSBC executives did not enjoy testifying before Parliament about all the tax-dodging that HSBC facilitated, tCEO Stuart Gulliver’s use of a Swiss bank account held by Panamanian shell company to receive his bonuses, which Gulliver has patiently and repeatedly explained was just to keep his co-workers from seeing how much he made, and not to dodge taxes.

And for Morgan Stanley.

Morgan Stanley agreed to pay $2.6 billion to settle Justice Department mortgage-fraud claims,and also “increased legal reserves for this settlement and other legacy residential mortgage-backed securities matters by approximately $2.8 billion” for 2014.

he American Banker contributor J. W. Rizzi writes:  Big banks are once again in the spotlight for a host of alleged misdeeds including tax evasion, money laundering, price rigging and manipulating foreign exchange rates. But despite the seriousness of these accusations, federal prosecutors have yet to file criminal charges against a senior bank executive.