Banking On Epstein
The sex trafficker couldn't have done it without America's biggest banks. Now Bank of America is paying off his victims.
This Week In Blunders March 22-28
“Money has no motherland. Financiers are without patriotism and without decency. Their sole object is gain.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
Who needs bitcoin when you can run your international crime network through Bank of America?
On Friday, the nation’s second-largest bank agreed to pay $72.5 million to settle victims’ claims that it helped enable Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation while denying it did any such thing.
Bank of America follows JPMorgan Chase, which agreed to pay $290 million to victims in 2023, and Deutsche Bank, which agreed to shell out $75 million that same year.
None of the banks admitted wrongdoing, because that’s the drill. Write the check. Deny the charges. Move on.
But all three banks did business with Epstein after his 2008 Florida conviction for crimes involving a minor. At that point, he wasn’t a mystery client. He was a registered sex offender with an online résumé.
Court filings and internal records show Epstein was flagged internally as a high-risk client. Employees referenced his sex offender status. Senior executives debated whether to keep him. Suspicious activity – including large cash movements and payments to women – was identified.
But the relationships sailed through compliance departments like superyachts to a private island.
As one complaint against Bank of America alleges:
“Bank of America went far beyond what a non-complicit bank would have done and instead assisted Epstein in setting up the necessary financial structure to operate his sex-trafficking venture.”
Another filing details the abuse:
“Epstein sexually abused Jane Doe on at least 100 occasions, including but not limited to, forcibly touching her, forcibly raping her, and forcing her to engage in sexual acts with other women for his own depraved sexual gratification.”
Congressional investigators have identified more than 20 financial institutions that held accounts for Epstein and related entities, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal.
Bank of New York Mellon faced a similar lawsuit, but a judge dismissed the case in early 2026, ruling its role was limited to routine correspondent banking. That decision is now on appeal.
In the end, we all know what was at stake: Transaction fees, commissions and powerful business connections. And as usual, bankers will keep their bonuses while their shareholders pay the settlements.
Bankers worry about money. Not girls being victimized by some of the most powerful men in the world.
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Red Lobster ‘treading water’
You could call Damola Adamolekun a puffer fish.
“This is going to be the greatest comeback in the history of the restaurant industry,” the 36-year-old CEO of Red Lobster told Fortune in January.
Red Lobster emerged from bankruptcy under new ownership in June. But after a braggadocious new start, it’s closing more locations, losing money and facing the possibility of another restructuring, according to a March 24 Bloomberg Businessweek report titled “Red Lobster’s Last Gasp.”
“Behind the scenes, the restaurant chain is treading water,” Bloomberg reports, noting roughly 100 underperforming restaurants dragging down results even after the first round of closures.
And that’s after Red Lobster already shuttered about 130 locations during its 2024 bankruptcy, which currently total less than 500.
Even after Chapter 11, the chain remains tethered to expensive, inflexible leases – a legacy of private equity ownership that sold off real estate in sale-leaseback deals, turning restaurants into renters. Yep. Leave it to the value-extraction chiefs to cook up another bankruptcy.
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Some locations can’t easily be closed without triggering penalties, locking the company into underperforming stores even as it tries to slim down, Bloomberg reports.
Now layer on rising food and labor costs and a cash-strapped consumer, and the comeback starts to look more like a go-back ... to the court.
They may want to rename it: “In the Red Lobster.”
Trumpflation at the gas station
President Donald Trump declared inflation all but dead, even after throwing a tariff tantrum, and then he started a war that has pushed oil to more than $100 a barrel, gasoline to $4 a gallon and diesel to nearly $6.
The big headline this week came from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which is forecasting 4.6% inflation for the U.S. this year. That’s far hotter than than the 2.9% it projected in its December forecast.
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The report says the energy shock from the Middle East conflict will keep rippling through the U.S. economy with inflation re-accelerating as oil and gas prices surge.
Before striking Iran, Trump was doing much better than expected on the inflation front, despite all the handwringing about tariffs, which have turned out to be much lower than advertised .
U.S. inflation held steady at a 2.4% annual rate in February, the lowest since May 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
If it indeed comes roaring back as the OECD forecasts, it won’t be on its own. It was invited.
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