[Adult Language Used – Parental Discretion Is Advised] Five of the world’s largest banks have agreed to pay more than $5 billion in fines to settle charges made by regulatory agencies and the Justice Department that the banks had acted in concert to manipulate international interest and foreign currency exchange rates.
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch said the banks had engaged in “brazenly illegal behavior . . . on a near-daily basis.” She added that the deal showed that the government “intends to vigorously prosecute all those who tilt the economic system in their favor [and] who subvert our marketplaces.”
The scale of the price-fixing scandal is hard to grasp, yet it touched, imperceptibly, almost every company and individual in the financial markets. By tweaking global benchmarks used to set foreign exchange and interest rates for a staggering number of transactions a day, the banks — over several years — bilked billions of dollars of extra profits by altering rates in their favor.”
Read more here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politic…
