Spoofing, as we have established, is awfully hard to prove in a court of law. Far, far better to come to a more or less amicable arrangement that makes clear that spoofing is very much not OK, but without the hassle of building a case or making an argument or potentially losing and having spoofing become de facto, if not de jure, OK, while also setting a very expensive precedent for those whose spoofing efforts far exceed those of Jamie Dimon’s people, however creative they’ve been.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. is poised to pay close to $1 billion to resolve market manipulation investigations by U.S. authorities into its trading of metals futures and Treasury securities…. A penalty approaching $1 billion would far exceed previous spoofing-related fines. It would also be on par with sanctions in many prior manipulation cases, including some brought several years ago against banks for allegedly rigging benchmark interest rates and foreign exchange markets.
And speaking of record settlements, we’ve got a quaint one from Down Under. And by quaint we mean in terms of size, as our banks pay far more for doing far less gross things.
Westpac, Australia’s second-largest bank, said it would pay a $920 million penalty for breaches that included a failure to detect transfers that may have been used to facilitate child exploitation in Asia.
The bank also said it had failed to report more than 19.5 million international transfers and didn’t keep records relating to the origin of some of them.
JPMorgan Is Set to Pay $1 Billion in Record Spoofing Penalty [Bloomberg]
Westpac to Pay Record Fine for 23 Million Money-Laundering, Terror-Financing Breaches [WSJ]