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, The Washington Post reported yesterday. Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch said that 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, the banks extracted billions of dollars of extra profits by altering rates. Critics complained that the Justice Department had failed to prosecute any additional individuals. Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Bank of Scotland Group and Citigroup will plead guilty to conspiring to manipulate the price of U.S. currency and euros, authorities said.
