She may have been robbed
Are foreign-exchange benchmarks the latest to be manipulated by bankers?
Oct 12th 2013
IT HAS been a dreadful couple of years for financial benchmarks. Banks turn out to have rigged LIBOR, an interest rate used to peg contracts worth trillions. Its equivalent in the world of derivatives, ISDAfix, has also come under question. Commodities prices from crude oil to platinum have been the subject of allegations and inquiries. Now prices in global currency markets, where turnover is $5 trillion a day, are being scrutinised by authorities, who suspect bankers have tampered with those too.
Switzerland’s financial watchdog announced on October 4th that it was investigating a slew of banks it thinks have manipulated currencies. Britain and the European Union also have probes under way. None has detailed its suspicions, but concerns reportedly centre around abnormal movements ahead of a widely-used daily snapshot of exchange rates, known as the 4pm “London fix”. It represents the average of prices agreed during 60 seconds’ trading, and is used as a reference rate to execute a much larger set of currency deals. Bankers, who are big participants in the market, have huge incentives to nudge the price of a given currency pairing ahead of the fix. With billions of dollars changing hands, a difference of a fraction of a cent can add a tidy sum to the bonus pool.
If proven, the charge would amount to banks fleecing their clients. Banks know the big trades they are about to execute on others’ behalf, and are often themselves the counterparty. By moving the markets ahead of the fix, they could alter the rate to their profit and their clients’ loss. One suspected method is “banging the close”: submitting a quick succession of orders just as the benchmark is set, to distort its value. Though indicators based on real trades are meant to be harder to game than those using hypothetical figures (such as LIBOR, a daily poll of banks’ estimated borrowing rates into which respondents fed duff data), they are clearly not incorruptible.
The 4pm fix is used to calculate the value of all sorts of assets, such as the foreign holdings of mutual funds. Fiddling the rates could thus have an impact far beyond the banks and their clients. Worse, if the bankers talked to each other ahead of their trades, as regulators think they may have, collusion will be added to the charge sheet. Investigations into other fiddled benchmarks have unearthed reams of messages between traders blithely discussing their swindles.
The risk of manipulation could be vastly diminished by using a benchmark that relies on more than just 60 seconds of trading, points out Mark Taylor, dean of Warwick Business School and a former currency-fund manager. The damage to implicated banks’ reputations will be harder to fix.
source:
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21587824-are-foreign-exchange-benchmarks-latest-be-manipulated-bankers-fx
related:
Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
The Libor Scandal In Full Perspective
Everything Is Rigged, Continued: European Commission Raids Oil Companies In Price-Fixing Probe
Such concerns were nonexistent prior to 1971, when the world had fixed exchange rates: currencies were a clearing mechanism, not an asset class. With the decision of the U.S. to terminate the convertibility of the dollar to gold, currencies began to be evaluated vis-a-vis their performance against other currencies (with the exception of China). Today currencies are an asset class separate from stocks and bonds. Indeed, the foreign currency exchange market constitutes the largest and most liquid market in the world, bigger than all the world’s stock, bond, future and options markets combined. Its trading volume tops $3 trillion — a day.
Of historic interest concerning this issue:
Of course, the Federal Reserve, being a private bank and not answerable to the US Government, did start overprinting paper dollars, and much of the perceived prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s was the result of foreign nations’ obligations to accept the paper notes as being worth gold at the rate of $35 an ounce. Then in 1970, France looked at the huge pile of paper notes sitting in their vaults, for which real French products like wine and cheese had been traded, and notified the United States government that they would exercise their option under Bretton Woods to return the paper notes for gold at the $35 per ounce exchange rate. Of course, the United States had nowhere near the gold to redeem the paper notes, so on August 15th, 1971, Richard Nixon “temporarily” suspended the gold convertibility of the US Federal Reserve Notes. This “Nixon shock” effectively ended Bretton Woods and many global currencies started to delink from the US dollar. Worse, since the United States had collateralized their loans with the nation’s gold reserves, it quickly became apparent that the US Government did not in fact have enough gold to cover the outstanding debts.
from: http://abzu2.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/all-wars-are-bankers-wars/