Tag: UBS

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Article: Swiss probe banks over foreign exchange market

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Swiss probe banks over foreign exchange market

BBC News, 31 March 2014

RBS, Barclays, UBS, Credit Suisse, Zuercher Kantonal Bank, Julius Baer, JP Morgan and Citigroup are being probed by Swiss competition commission, Weko.

“Evidence exists that these banks colluded to manipulate exchange rates in foreign currency trades,” Weko said.

The regulator opened a preliminary investigation last October. Weko said the information it had so far suggested that most important exchange rates are affected.

Authorities worldwide are investigating allegations that some foreign exchange traders have colluded in setting certain key exchange rates in the foreign exchange market, resulting in big profits. Continue reading “Article: Swiss probe banks over foreign exchange market”

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Article: London Gold Fix study suggests decade of bank manipulation

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London Gold Fix study suggests decade of bank manipulation

Bloomberg News, 28 February 2014

The London gold fix, the benchmark used by miners, jewellers and central banks to value the metal, may have been manipulated for a decade by the banks setting it, researchers say.

Unusual trading patterns around 3 p.m. in London, when the so-called afternoon fix is set on a private conference call between five of the biggest gold dealers, are a sign of collusive behavior and should be investigated, New York University’s Stern School of Business Professor Rosa Abrantes-Metz and Albert Metz, a managing director at Moody’s Investors Service, wrote in a draft research paper.

“The structure of the benchmark is certainly conducive to collusion and manipulation, and the empirical data are consistent with price artificiality,” they say in the report, which hasn’t yet been submitted for publication. “It is likely that co-operation between participants may be occurring.”

The paper is the first to raise the possibility that the five banks overseeing the century-old rate —Barclays Plc, Deutsche Bank AG, Bank of Nova Scotia, HSBC Holdings Plc and Societe Generale SA — may have been actively working together to manipulate the benchmark. It also adds to pressure on the firms to overhaul the way the rate is calculated. Authorities around the world, already investigating the manipulation of benchmarks from interest rates to foreign exchange, are examining the $20 trillion gold market for signs of wrongdoing.

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Article: Currency trading scandals are the next big black eye for banks

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Currency trading scandals are the next big black eye for banks

Mark DeCambre, Jason Karaian

Quartz, 5 February 2014

These days, it doesn’t take much digging to find potentially scandalous behavior coursing through the world’s biggest banks. But the latest round of probes into currency trading are shaping up to be a real doozy.

Already more than 20 traders, which make money for their firms by betting on currencies’ shifting values, have left or been placed on leave by their employers. These banks and traders have not been accused of wrongdoing, but their departures send a message that something is amiss in currency trading.

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Article: Naked Gold Shorts: The Hows and Whys of Gold Price Manipulation

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Naked Gold Shorts: The Hows and Whys of Gold Price Manipulation

Commodity Trade Mantra, 20 January 2014

The deregulation of the financial system during the Clinton and George W. Bush regimes had the predictable result: financial concentration and reckless behavior. A handful of banks grew so large that financial authorities declared them “too big to fail.” Removed from market discipline, the banks became wards of the government requiring massive creation of new money by the Federal Reserve in order to support through the policy of Quantitative Easing the prices of financial instruments on the banks’ balance sheets and in order to finance at low interest rates trillion dollar federal budget deficits associated with the long recession caused by the financial crisis.

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Article: Stripped bare

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Stripped bare

Securities Lending Times, 20 August 2013

“Abusive”, “like a form of terrorism” and “funny paper”are three descriptions of naked short selling, given by the Securities and Exchange Committee, a life insurance company CEO, and broker-dealer Jeffrey Wolfson, respectively.

They do not do much to dispel the belief of naked shorting as a practice that is even worse than selling a borrowed security, only to buy it back at a lower price—what we know as covered short selling.

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Article: UBS, in Theory, a Conspiracy to Naked Short “Tens of Millions” of Shares

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UBS, in Theory, a Conspiracy to Naked Short “Tens of Millions” of Shares

MARK MITCHELL, 01 May 2013

It wasn’t long ago when they were saying that naked short selling never happened. They said it simply did not exist, that only wild-eyed conspiracy theorists believed in naked short selling. That was before 2008, when the CEOs of some big banks started hollering that naked short selling was causing the stock prices of their banks to nosedive. With the CEOs of the big banks hollering, the SEC, in June, 2008, issued an Emergency Order banning naked short selling (that previously did not exist) in the stocks of 19 big financial institutions (i.e. the financial institutions that were doing the naked short selling—to each other). But the SEC did nothing about the naked short selling of other stocks because, apparently, that naked short selling existed only in the fevered imaginations of people who believed that their savings were being wiped out by little green men. Continue reading “Article: UBS, in Theory, a Conspiracy to Naked Short “Tens of Millions” of Shares”

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Article: UBS, FINRA, and Naked Short Selling: “Duration, Scope and Volume of The Trading Created a Potential for Harm to The Integrity of The Market.”

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UBS, FINRA, and Naked Short Selling: “Duration, Scope and Volume of The Trading Created a Potential for Harm to The Integrity of The Market.”

Larry Doyle, 25 February 2013

Last summer I tagged Wall Street’s industry funded police at FINRA as being little more than meter maids. With a recent review of FINRA’s largest fine imposed in its history, I now realize that I have actually done a serious disservice to those diligent and hard working meter maids patrolling our cities and towns. How so?

Let’s navigate and look more deeply into FINRA’s $12 million fine imposed on those paragons of virtue who ran Union Bank of Switzerland’s equity operations.

What did UBS do to deserve FINRA’s “largest” fine? Continue reading “Article: UBS, FINRA, and Naked Short Selling: “Duration, Scope and Volume of The Trading Created a Potential for Harm to The Integrity of The Market.””

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Article: UBS Risk Management Fiasco Illustrates Hidden Big Bank IT Time Bombs

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UBS Risk Management Fiasco Illustrates Hidden Big Bank IT Time Bombs

Yves Smith

Naked Capitalism, 11 January 2013

One of the sources of risk in big and even moderately big banks that does not get the attention it deserves is information systems. Having mission critical systems function smoothly, or at least adequately, is crucial to a major trading operation. Huge volumes of transactions flow through these firms, and the various levels of reporting (customer exposures, funds flows, risk levels, transaction and reconciliation failures) need to be highly reliable or things get ugly fast. Witness MF Global, where the firm was unable to cope with the transaction volume of its final days and literally did not know where money was at various points in time during the day.

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Article: The Federal Reserve Bank is Naked: QE 10T Dollar ‘Loans’ Swaps and Naked Mortgage Bonds of Quantitative Easing 1

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The Federal Reserve Bank is Naked: QE 10T Dollar ‘Loans’ Swaps and Naked Mortgage Bonds of Quantitative Easing 1

Lan Pham

Economics Voodoo, 28 December 2012

The banking and financial crisis emerging in September 2008 is often called a global financial crisis, but to be more precise the data point to a crisis of the Western central banks. I referenced euros previously, so this is the euros companion to Quantitative Easing 0-1-2-3∞ & The Federal Reserve’s Love Affair with its Banks and Mortgage Bonds: Levitating The Black Hole. QE 0-1-2-3 is incomplete as concurrently the Federal Reserve Bank also entered into $10.06 Trillion in dollar ‘loans’ liquidity swaps with foreign central banks that we examine in Section I. Why QE $10T as we look at a few of Europe’s largest banks in Section II, which leads us to the $1.25 Trillion naked reasons behind the Federal Reserve Bank’s Quantitative Easing I purchase of phantom agency mortgage bonds that we revisit more closely in Section III.

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Article: HSBC pays record $1.9bn fine to settle US money-laundering accusations

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HSBC pays record $1.9bn fine to settle US money-laundering accusations

Jill Treanor and Dominic Rushe,  11 December 2012

HSBC was guilty of a “blatant failure” to implement anti-money laundering controls and wilfully flouted US sanctions, American prosecutors said, as the bank was forced to pay a record $1.9bn (£1.2bn) to settle allegations it allowed terrorists to move money around the financial system.

Hours after the bank’s chief executive, Stuart Gulliver, said he was “profoundly sorry” for the failures, assistant attorney general Lanny Breuer told a press conference in New York that Mexican drug traffickers deposited hundreds of thousands of dollars each day in HSBC accounts. At least $881m in drug trafficking money was laundered throughout the bank’s accounts. Continue reading “Article: HSBC pays record $1.9bn fine to settle US money-laundering accusations”

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Article: Heist of the century: Wall Street’s role in the financial crisis

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Heist of the century: Wall Street’s role in the financial crisis

Charles Ferguson, 20 May 2012

Bernard L Madoff ran the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, operating it for 30 years and causing cash losses of $19.5bn. Shortly after the scheme collapsed and Madoff confessed in 2008, evidence began to surface that for years, major banks had suspected he was a fraud. None of them reported their suspicions to the authorities, and several banks decided to make money from him without, of course, risking any of their own funds. Theories about his fraud varied. Some thought he might have access to insider information. But quite a few thought he was running a Ponzi scheme. Goldman Sachs executives paid a visit to Madoff to see if they should recommend him to clients. A partner later recalled: “Madoff refused to let them do any due diligence on the funds and when asked about the firm’s investment strategy they couldn’t understand it. Goldman not only blacklisted Madoff in the asset management division but banned its brokerage from trading with the firm too.” Continue reading “Article: Heist of the century: Wall Street’s role in the financial crisis”

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Article: UBS will pay $12M over naked shorts

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UBS will pay $12M over naked shorts

dcubberley, 27 October 2011

UBS AG, Switzerland’s biggest bank, will pay $12 million to resolve Financial Industry Regulatory Authority claims that a brokerage unit allowed millions of short-sale orders to be placed without reasonable grounds to believe that the securities could be delivered. Continue reading “Article: UBS will pay $12M over naked shorts”

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Article: UBS comes up short; fined $12 million by Finra for ‘systemic supervisory failure’

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UBS comes up short; fined $12 million by Finra for ‘systemic supervisory failure’

Finextra, 26 October 2011

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra) has fined UBS Securities $12 million for failing to properly supervise short sales of securities.

The Swiss bank’s US brokerage unit violated Regulation SHO, which requires a broker-dealer to have reasonable grounds to believe that the security could be borrowed and available for delivery before accepting or effecting a short sale order, says Finra.

The rules require firms to obtain and document this “locate” information before the short sale occurs to help cut the number of potential failures to deliver.
Continue reading “Article: UBS comes up short; fined $12 million by Finra for ‘systemic supervisory failure’”

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Article: UBS fined in U.S. over improper short sales

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UBS fined in U.S. over improper short sales

Jonathan Stempel, 25 October 2011

In the largest penalty of its type, Swiss bank UBS AG was fined $12 million by a U.S. brokerage regulator over its “systemic” failure to properly handle millions of short-sale orders.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority said violations by the bank’s UBS Securities LLC broker-dealer unit caused the orders to be mismarked or filled without reasonable grounds to believe the underlying securities could be located.

In short sales, investors sell securities they do not own, hoping the prices will fall so they can repurchase the securities later at the lower price, repay the lender and pocket the difference as profit. Regulators fear that abuses can distort markets, and accelerate declines in share prices. Continue reading “Article: UBS fined in U.S. over improper short sales”

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Filing: FINRA v UBS

Filing

FINRA v UBS

24 October 2011

As set forth below, the Firm failed to comply with certain requirements of Reg SHO, FINRA Rules, NASD Rules and federal securities laws during the period covering, in whole or in part, January 3, 2005 through March 2010, with several violations continuing through December 31, 2010 (the “Relevant Period”), The Firm’s violations existed for various periods of time throughout the Relevant Period and are summarized below.

PDF (26 pages): FINRA v UBS

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