Italy's Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena and regulators are investigating the trades.
Italian banks posted losses, with Banco Popolare down 4.7%, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena off 3.4%, and UniCredit shedding 2.1%.
McDonnell pointed to the Democratic Party's role in placing the chairman, Giuseppi Mussari, through the bank's largest shareholder, Fondazione Monte dei Paschi di Siena.
The recent takeover by Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena of Banca Agricola Mantovana has created a precedent for change among its fellow co-operatives.
Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena's shares tumbled further amid fears that years-old structured-product contracts could leave the bank with larger losses than expected for 2012.
In November, when it asked for more aid, Italy's Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena reported a loss of 1.7bn euros for the first nine months of the year.
Italian financial police detained Gianluca Baldassarri, a former executive at Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, as part of a probe into the bank, fearing he could leave the country.
Unicredit is down 17.01%, Banco Monte Dei Paschi di Siena has lost 20.77%, Banca Popolare di Milano Scarl has dropped 21.39% and Intesa SanPaolo has plummeted 27.70%, according to data provided by Cantor.
This lending constriction worsens a eurozone recession, which in turn exacerbates the weakness of banks: a financing or liquidity crisis morphs into a solvency crisis, as has already happened in Spain and looks set to happen in Italy (yesterday's refinancing of Italy's Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena augurs ill).
This week, the Bank of Italy released a statement in Italian saying that the "true nature of certain transactions regarding the Monte dei Paschi di Siena reported in the press has emerged only recently, following the discovery of documents kept hidden to the supervisory authority and brought to light by the new management of MPS".
But it is not particularly true of his big opponents -- including the left-wing Democratic Party, which has its own scandals, its own selfish interests and, during the election campaign, its own evidence of the abuse of political power in the case of Italy's third-largest (and oldest) bank, Monte dei Paschi di Siena, whose business was allegedly run and distorted in the interests of local Democratic Party politicians in that area.
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