巴克莱银行涉嫌操纵黄金价格被罚

Barclays has been fined more than 40 million dollars for manipulating the prices of gold. UK regulartors found that  one of its former traders exploited weaknesses in the system to benefit the bank at the expense of a customer. Amazingly, he carried out the trade just one day after Barclay was fined $450,000,000 for trying to fix interest rates. Jim Bouden joines us now with more details. And Jim, this, sorts of, speaks volumes, as I suppose, to the culture of the bank steal.

Yes, it does indeed. I remember, standing outside Barclays Bank that day, talking about manipulation of  what is called Libor, little did we know that one of their gold traders inside that building was very much manipulating the gold price as the gold fix. And he has been fined $160,000 as well, and his name is Daniel Plunkett. Now this is (what) all come out in the press release from the regulator. They were very specific about how this happened. I thougt that is quite interesting. He saved the bank 3.9 million dollars in the one minute around the gold fix 3 o'clock by manipulating the price just enough: they didn't have to pay their client that 3.9 million dollars. The client knew right away, complained, now taking a long time for all this to come out in the public, but the bank obviously has paid their client that money, they fined Mr. Plunkett, and said he was banned from doing some trades for a while. Barclay, of course, has announced last few years, Anthony Jenkins, the CEO said " We will really clean up our acts, we are not the bank that was there at that time..." And so they are saying that "This won't happen again. Both of the bank and Plunkett were fined, as they normally would. They agreed to a settlement early. This is one of the incentives that the regulators have here in the UK. They try to get people to agree (to) a fine early and that means they don't get a fine that much. But Nancy, this is a problem that London has been having for a couple of years, we are talking about interest rate, we are talking about Libor, and now we are talking about gold fixing. London has a  laissez-faire attitude here, of self-relations when it comes to this market that all are heavy regulated, they are not like the stock-market, and again London got stunned, and so they promised here to really crack down on all of these, sort of, fixing, it goes on here, it is antiquated, you know they have a phone call at ten o'clock and another phone call 3 o'clock, they fix the price legally fix the price, and they all go to the pub.

Yeah, I think the problem, of course, Jim, is that, you know well that as this is one person's action, and yes the system is antiquated and it needs to be updated. I think that the take-it-away for most people is that when given an opportunity, the culture in banking is still to cheat if you can, and worry about getting caught later and that is what so frustrating as we see here for so long after what we saw go down in the financial crises. * would wonder what is going on for those and who haven't, sort of, been noticed. Disturbing, alright, Jim, thank you so much for that.