Banks fined more than $5B, to plead guilty to market rigging
By KEN SWEET and ERIC TUCKER
The Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) - Four of the world's biggest banks agreed Wednesday to pay more than $5 billion in penalties and plead guilty to rigging the currency markets - a rare instance in which federal prosecutors have wrung an admission of criminal wrongdoing from a major financial institution.
Traders at JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland were accused of working together to manipulate rates on the foreign exchange market, where hundreds of billions of dollars and euros change hands back and forth.
Still, the punishment announced Wednesday may have limited practical consequences.
The four banks will be able to continue to do business in the currency markets. No executives were charged, though that part of the investigation continues. And the fines, while large, are a fraction of what the institutions have made through currency trading over the past decade.
Prosecutors said traders shared customer orders through chat rooms and used that information to profit at their clients' expenses. The traders called themselves "The Cartel," and in one of those chat rooms, a Barclays employee wrote: "if you aint cheating, you aint trying," investigators said....
