| Wednesday morning's admission of guilt probably came as a shock to many, but it certainly wasn't shocking to me. I have been writing for years that Wall Street is a rigged casino and that includes the portion of "The Street" in Europe. Yesterday morning five global banks acknowledged their part in rigging Forex markets across the world. The WSJ reported: Four of the banks, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Barclays PLC, Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC, and Citigroup Inc., will plead guilty to conspiring to manipulate the price of U.S. dollars and euros, authorities said. The fifth bank, UBS AG , received immunity in the antitrust case, but will plead guilty to manipulating the Libor benchmark after prosecutors said the bank violated an earlier accord meant to resolve those allegations of misconduct. UBS will also pay an additional Libor-related fine. Bank of America Corp. will also pay a $205 million penalty to the Fed to resolve the regulator's foreign exchange probe. Bank of America didn't face similar action from the Justice Department. Authorities said euro dollar traders at the banks, who were self-described members of "The Cartel" communicated through coded language in an online chat room to coordinate attempts to move rates set at 1:15 and 4 p.m. ...No traders have yet been criminally charged over the conduct, but New York's financial regulator said it required Barclays to fire eight employees in connection with the resolution. Investigations into individuals are continuing, according to government officials. Despite admitting to rigging GLOBAL markets in the $Trillions, nobody has gone to jail. Despite breaking the laws for years upon years, no bank has lost its license to do business in the US. Sadly, the $5.6 billion collective fine is just the cost of doing business when these same five banks profited $92 billion over this same period of time. Moreover, these fines are not paid by the banks executives; they're paid by the shareholders as the cost will be passed along to its customers and share holders. The crime syndicate doesn't have it nearly this good. Tomorrow – Part II of how Fraud Street goes about some of its day-to-day scamming the market. Trade well and follow the trend, not the perma-bull OR perma-bear "experts." Behold the age of infinite moral hazard! On April 2nd, 2009 CONgress forced FASB to suspend rule 157 in favor of deceitful accounting for the TBTF banking mafia. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep a civil tongue.