London - When US regulators come calling with subpoenas, banks have usually chosen to assume the position.
Small wonder, given the fondness of watchdogs for multibillion-dollar penalties - not to mention the scary consequences of getting on their bad side. Try asking BNP Paribas how much fun it is being a big global banking group that isn't allowed to clear dollar transactions.
Read: Dark pools: Barclays, Credit Suisse will pay
Barclays, however, chose to take a different tack when New York's Attorney-General Eric Schneiderman came calling with allegations about how it operated its “dark pool” stock exchange and how it was used by the sort of high-frequency traders made infamous by Michael Lewis's bestseller Flash Boys.
The bank was feisty. It braced for a fight. It got to the stage of pooh-poohing Schneiderman's allegations in public and tried to get them dismissed.
The case, it said, had “clear and substantial factual errors”, used “snippets of marketing brochures” and relied on “brief quotes in news articles”. It claimed Schneiderman failed “to identify any fraud” while “establishing no material mis-statements, no identified victims and no actual harm”.
We were also told the A-G, seeking re-election, had overreached himself and should have left oversight of such exchanges to the Securities & Exchange Commission. Which happily joined the party and will now take half of the $70m (£49m) penalty Barclays has agreed. Not exactly one of those multibillion-dollar mega-penalties of which the US authorities are so fond, it's true, but still a record in this sphere.
In part, Barclays' sudden kow-tow is a matter of expediency. It chose to fight under the regime of Antony Jenkins. For his recently arrived successor, Jes Staley, settling for what amounts to a rounding error gets rid of an irritation that might have become something worse.
When Barclays was still fighting back it had sought to portray this as a shakedown by an ambitious attorney-general. Let's assume that's true, for a moment. Given the number and scale of its past misdeeds, Barclays, indeed any bank (it's worth noting that Credit Suisse has also ponied up), isn't going to get much sympathy. That won't change until there is a genuine change in the way they conduct themselves, and we're not there yet.
THE INDEPENDENT