For Preet Bharara, "before too long" translates to about five weeks. On Mar 31, Bharara, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, dropped a hint: "You can expect before too long a significant financial institution will be charged with a felony or made to plead guilty to a felony where the conduct warrants it," he said at the annual Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association compliance conference in Orlando, FL. Now the government seems poised deliver on his promise by pursuing criminal charges against Credit Suisse and BNP Paribas, according to the New York Times and Bloomberg News. It's notable that the two that may suffer both of those consequences for the first time are not America's largest and second-largest deposit-taking institutions but are non-US banks. Charging individual bank executives who were responsible for the transactions would have lesser repercussions on the financial system than charging the companies as a whole, which penalizes shareholders more than anyone who actually broke the law.