Your Evening Briefing: TD Fined $3.1 Billion Over Money Laundering

TD Bank will pay almost $3.1 billion in fines and other penalties and face a cap on its US retail banking assets after pleading guilty to failing to prevent money laundering by drug cartels, among others. The settlement concludes a months-long saga and multiple probes into the lender’s failure to catch financial crimes at bank branches in multiple US states, including New York, New Jersey and Florida. The bank’s failures “enabled three money laundering networks to collectively transfer more than $670 million through TD Bank accounts between 2019 and 2023,” the Justice Department said on Thursday. The investigations have already hit Toronto-Dominion hard, leaving a black mark on Chief Executive Officer Bharat Masrani’s decade-long tenure. It also forced the lender to scrap a $13.4 billion deal to acquire US regional bank First Horizon last year. Analysts and investors fear the asset cap may hamper the bank’s growth-by-acquisition strategy.

US inflation is now at its lowest point since it began its fateful rise during the pandemic, with new numbers potentially providing a boost to the Biden administration, and by extension Vice President Kamala Harris in her bid for the White House. (The so-called core consumer price index, however, which excludes food and energy costs, increased more than forecast.) Here’s your markets wrap.