A dozen banking giants have been sued in New York for allegedly fixing global foreign exchange rates in the latest ripple to accompany government probes of the huge market.
The defendants in the lawsuit, which include BNP Paribas and JPMorgan Chase, shared confidential information during private online chat sessions to collude and fix trades on the key WM/Reuters foreign exchange rate, which is set each afternoon in London, according to a class-action complaint filed on Monday.
The conspiracy “impacted the pricing of trillions of dollars’ worth of FX Instruments, inflicting severe financial harm on Plaintiffs and members of the Class,” the complaint said.
The complaint did not quantify the losses, calling the impact of the rate-fixing “presently undetermined.”
The other defendants in the case are Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, RBS and UBS.
A dozen plaintiffs are in the class-action suit, which amends and expands a suit in November last year against seven banks filed by Haverhill Retirement System of Haverhill, Massachusetts.
The 11 plaintiffs that joined the original lawsuit on Monday include Aureus Currency Fund, a California investment fund, the City of Philadelphia and the Oklahoma Firefighters Pension and Retirement System.
Defendants in the case are “dominant” dealers in foreign exchange, with about 84 percent of market share with transactions worth about US$5.3 trillion per day.
The complaint called foreign exchange “one of the world’s least regulated financial markets” and rated it an “opaque” system because most trading takes place away from exchanges.
The suit comes as regulators in the US, the EU, Britain and other venues launch probes of foreign-exchange market manipulation. Banks have suspended or fired more than 30 employees in the wake of these probes, according to the complaint.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day