A U.S. bank regulator fined three U.S. banks involved in currency manipulation $950 billion on Wednesday, adding to penalties imposed by U.S., U.K. and Swiss regulators on six banks, bringing the total amount of fines to more than $4 billion.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the agency within the U.S. Treasury responsible for bank regulation, said Wednesday that it fined Bank of America $250 million, Citibank $350 million and JPMorgan Chase $350 million for their role in rigging foreign exchange markets, in addition to issuing cease and desist orders to the banks to rein in their foreign exchange practices.
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission had announced its own assessment of $1.4 billion in fines on five banks earlier in the day. The CFTC’s action did not include Bank of America, but did affect the Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS and HSBC. Including penalties imposed by British and Swiss regulators, Wednesday’s fines amount to $4.2 billion on the six banks altogether.
Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry said the “enforcement actions we are issuing today make clear that the OCC will take forceful action, not only when the institutions we supervise engage in wrongdoing, but when management fails to exercise the oversight necessary to ensure that employees follow laws and regulations intended to protect customers and maintain the integrity of markets.”
Curry added that the OCC’s investigation revealed that the banks “permitted an environment to develop in which unscrupulous traders discussed manipulating foreign exchange markets.”
Currency traders at the banks coordinated to manipulate exchange rates, exchanged bank and customer information, and talked about trades that would hurt their own customers, according to the OCC.
In a response to the Wall Street Journal, a JPMorgan spokesman said “the trader conduct described in today’s settlements is unacceptable.” Other banks said that they were reviewing their traders’ behavior and their own practices for avoiding employee misconduct.
