Month: June 2014

Osborne to target foreign exchange manipulation in City clean-up

Kamal Ahmed, 02 June 2014

The obscure and complicated foreign exchange market is to be the next target of Treasury action, I have been told.

The chancellor is working with Whitehall officials and the international Financial Stability Board (FSB) on new regulations which will be imposed on the market. At the moment, foreign exchange (known in City shorthand as “forex”) is largely unregulated and left to the bank traders who execute deals on behalf of global companies. Companies use forex deals to move money between different currencies and a large part of the market is dealt through London.

One senior official I have spoken to agreed that the public would be “very surprised” that such a major market was clearly open to abuse. The Treasury is likely to announce a set of measures to “clean up the market”, probably in the next fortnight.

The prices in forex are set by traders who are doing the deals. Traders are able to pick a selection of the trades they have been asked to execute, meaning they can choose those most advantageous to their bank. The prices are set at the 4pm “fix”, a daily City benchmark against which currencies are priced. I have written a short “How It Works” at the end of this blog on the allegation that forex is manipulated.

Regulators around the world including the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in London and the US Department of Justice are investigating allegations of forex manipulation. It has been reported that at least 15 banks are involved and nine are thought to have suspended or fired traders. No allegations have been proved and no admissions of fault made.

Martin Wheatley, the head of the FCA, said the allegations, if substantiated, could be “every bit as bad as Libor”, referring to the revelations three years ago that the market which governs how banks lend to each other was regularly fixed.

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