Is Da Fix In?

ATTORNEY: H. ADAM PRUSSIN
POMERANTZ MONITOR: SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2014

About two years ago, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission started an investigation into whether the world’s largest banks had conspired to manipulate ISDA¬fix, a benchmark similar to LIBOR, which in this case is used to set rates for trillions of dollars of complex financial products, such as interest-rate swaps. Much of the evidence collected by the CFTC seems to have been provided as a byproduct of the LIBOR rate-fixing investigation. Pomerantz currently represents a number of banks and financial institutions in a class action on behalf of lenders arising out of the LIBOR rate-rigging scandal.

A few weeks ago, the press reported that the CFTC reported to the Justice Department that it had found evidence of criminal collusion in manipulating ISDAfix rates. 

Here we go again. 

Until this year, the dollar-denominated version of the ISDAfix rate was set daily by ICAP, a brokerage firm, based on price quote data submitted by banks. Once the CFTC started investigating, ICAP lost that central role.

Bloomberg News reported last year that the CFTC had found evidence that traders at Wall Street banks had instructed brokers to buy or sell as many interest-rate swaps as necessary to rig ISDAfix, by moving it to a predetermined level. Doing so helped banks reap millions of dollars in trading profits, at the expense of companies and pension funds.

Since then, the Alaska Electrical Pension Fund has filed a civil action accusing 13 banks, including Barclays, Bank of America and Citigroup, of conspiring to fix ISDAfix. The Fund claimed the banks did this in order to manipulate payments to investors on the derivatives. The banks’ alleged actions affected trillions of dollars of financial instruments tied to ISDAfix, including so-called “swap¬tions,” which enable institutions to hedge against moves in interest rates. By fixing the rate, the banks apparent¬ly hoped to profit on transactions in these instruments.

The Alaska Fund further alleges that the banks coordi¬nated their scheme through electronic chat rooms and other private communications channels, and the result was that, as far back as 2009, they often submitted identical rate quotes to ICAP, down to the thousandth of a ratings point. The Fund alleges that “even if reporting banks always responded similarly to market conditions, the odds against contributors unilaterally submitting the exact same quotes down to the thousandth of a basis point are astronomical. Yet, this happened almost every single day between at least 2009 and December 2012.” 

The Feds want to throw some people in jail to show that they are tough on Wall Street after all. Maybe they have found some ripe targets.