Canada’s second largest bank may have just seen its tiny money laundering problem turn into a big one. TD, also the sixth largest bank in North America, recently disclosed they’ll be setting aside hundreds of millions in funds for any potential fines related to an anti-money laundering (AML) complia...
TD has a 5.37% dividend yield, a market cap of 134.46B, and $8.498B in profit.
Doing the math, their earnings are 6.32% of capitalization. They have less than 1% slack in their earnings yield after dividends. That works out to about $1¼B per year in free cashflow. So a $2B fine is roughly 2 years of capital accumulation; a big setback for sure!
Counterpoint: a very large fraction of the population is one unexpected bill away from insolvency. It doesn't seem unreasonable to impose a similar fear on corporations for actual criminal activity.
Yes, that's me saying that a corporation breaking the law should have to legitimately consider closing it's doors. In some cases, forced closure should be part of the actual penalty.