WIlliam Dudley, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has again used a speech to criticize the "unethical behavior" in banks that he says may be endemic to the industry.

In a speech given Thursday, Dudley said that the LIBOR scandal, where bank employees helped manipulate these benchmark interest rates to make their trades more profitable, was evidence of "questionable behavioral norms the industry." LIBOR, which stands for "London Interbank Offered Rate," is a measure of what interest rate banks can borrow at in different currencies at different times and is the basis for the price of hundreds of trillions worth of financial products.

Dudley said the LIBOR scandal was evidence of a "sad state of affairs" where "unethical behavior is socialized among new traders with the explanation that this is business as usual." The LIBOR scandal has engulfed several banks, leading to billions worth of penalties in settlements with regulators and even the resignation in July 2012 of the British bank Barclays' then-CEO, Bob Diamond.

Dudley also said it was "untenable" for "people working in compliance and risk [to be] treated as second-class citizens relative to the firms' revenue generators."

This is not the first time that Dudley has used the bully pulpit to criticize the culture of banks. The criticism is notable coming from the head of the New York Fed, which supervises large Wall Street institutions like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan and, in its role executing monetary policy, has commercial relationships with the biggest banks in the U.S. and overseas.