The US Department of Justice is investigating whether the world’s biggest banks manipulated prices of precious metals such as silver and gold, according to people familiar with the matter.
At least 10 banks, including Barclays PLC, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and Deutsche Bank AG are being probed by the department’s antitrust division, said one the people, who asked not to be named because the matter is confidential.
The metals probe, which is in the early stages, broadens the department’s ongoing scrutiny of banks over manipulation of financial benchmarks. Prosecutors are conducting criminal investigations into the alleged rigging of interbank lending rates and currency markets.
HSBC Holdings PLC on Monday disclosed that the Justice Department and the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission have sought documents from the bank on precious-metals dealings. The bank said it is cooperating in the probes.
Spokesmen for the department and the commodities regulators declined to comment.
The other banks under investigation are Credit Suisse Group AG, UBS Group AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Societe Generale SA, Bank of Nova Scotia, and Standard Bank Group Ltd, the person said.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that those banks were being investigated. The banks either declined to comment or did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Three banks that settled currency-manipulation claims with US regulators in November — Bank of America Corp, JPMorgan, Citigroup Inc and — were required under terms of those agreements to review and identify “other trading activities that could raise similar market conduct issues.”
Those reviews triggered scrutiny of precious metals trading, another source said.
Fixings, price-setting rituals dating back a century for gold, silver, platinum and palladium, are being overhauled as scrutiny increases over how market benchmarks are set.
Switzerland’s regulator said in November that it found “serious misconduct” by UBS employees in precious metals trading.
Barclays was fined in May by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority after a trader sought to influence the gold fix in 2012.
HSBC, Barclays and Deutsche Bank are among banks that have been sued in the US over claims they conspired to manipulate precious metals prices for years.
London-based HSBC is also under a five-year deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department from a previous money-laundering settlement. The agreement requires the bank to cooperate in other probes.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS