Excerpt
SUMMARY: Five major banking institutions pleaded guilty to rigging currencies and manipulating the foreign exchange market in a case brought by the Department of Justice and other authorities. The banks were accused of manipulating the world's largest and least-regulated trading market, and have agreed to pay more than $5 billion in total. Judy Woodruff learns more from Keri Geiger of Bloomberg News.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Big banks and their behavior are again at the heart of a new criminal case brought by the Department of Justice and other authorities today. Five major institutions pled guilty to rigging currencies and manipulating the foreign exchange market.
The banks also agreed to pay more than $5 billion combined in new penalties. The fines were some of the biggest brought to date by the federal government. The banks were accused of manipulating the world’s largest and least regulated trading market, where trillions of dollars change hands. Among those pleading guilty, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Barclays, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and UBS.
At a press conference in Washington, Attorney General Loretta Lynch spelled out how the rigging worked.
LORETTA LYNCH, Attorney General: Starting as early as 2007, currency traders at several multinational banks formed a group that they dubbed the Cartel.
It’s perhaps fitting that they chose that name, as it aptly describes the brazenly illegal behavior that they were engaged in on a near five-year basis. Almost every day, for more than five years, traders in this cartel used a private electronic chat room to manipulate the spot market’s exchange rate between euros and dollars, using coded language to conceal their collusion.
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