Thursday, November 13, 2014

More fines...

but still no jail time. These fines are for rigging the foreign exchange market; the LIBOR fines are extra. The fines total $4.3 billion and were levied in the U.S., England and Swotzwerland. In the U.S. the CFTC issued fines totaling $1.4 billion to JPMorgan, Citigroup, UBS, HSBC and RBS; the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency fined JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup a total of $950 million.The same five banks were fined $1.7 billion by the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Swiss regulator FINMA charged only UBS with a fine of $139 million and included rigging of precious metals trading along with rigging foreign exchange maarkets.

The CFTC complaint against JPMorgan sounds familiar. It “lacked adequate internal controls in order to prevent its FX traders from engaging in improper communications with certain FX traders at other banks. JPMC lacked sufficient policies, procedures and training specifically governing participation in trading around the FX benchmarks rates and had inadequate policies pertaining to, or insufficient oversight of, its FX traders’ use of chat rooms or other electronic messaging.”

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