Swiss bank UBS will pay $1.5 billionfor their role in the Libor rate-rigging scandal. The sum is over three times the fine imposed on Barclays Bank for the same violations. UBS also admitted to one count of wire fraud in its Japanese unit, according to the Justice Department. Much of the rate rigging in the [...]

Time to put everyone to sleep with a rousing discussion of interest on excess reserves. Gaetano Antinolfi and Todd Keister of the New York Federal Reserve have written an article about the Fed’s practice of providing interest on “excess reserves” from banks, who stash their money at the central bank and collect a small fee [...]

Tim Geithner is testifying before the House Financial Services Committee on a number of issues today. It looked like he would skate by without questions on the Libor scandal until Scott Garrett, an unlikely source, tore into him: Garrett’s anger was different. Why? Because he was most upset that Geithner had four years, and meeting [...]

Speaking of bank fraud, the British Parliament continued their investigation into Barclays Bank and the Libor scandal this week, and it’s just getting worse and worse for everyone involved. Yesterday, Jerry del Missier, the former COO of Barclays, testified that he was instructed by CEO Bob Diamond to manipulate the Libor down in 2008, to [...]

I said yesterday that I could actually envision a few criminal prosecutions on Libor rate-rigging in the coming months. We know that plenty of banks are involved – I don’t think Barclays warned their employees about additional revelations at other banks, they simply prepared them for it, as a pretext to assuring that the heat [...]

As part of the release of data from the New York Federal Reserve Bank yesterday, a phone transcript revealed that a Barclays employee admitted to the regulatory body that their submissions of the interest rate benchmark, Libor, were fraudulent, and that they assumed all other banks engaged in the same practice. Here’s the transcript of [...]

The flames of the Libor scandal have been creeping up under the feet of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Evidence showed that the New York Fed found out about the rate-rigging from Barclays and other banks in 2007, when Geithner was still the bank President. This appeared to display regulatory impotence in the face of massive [...]

As the Libor scandal intensifies, some of the scrutiny has shifted from the role of the banks to the role of the regulators who potentially either actively ignored the rate-rigging happening under their noses, or outright encouraged it. This was the accusation leveled by former Barclays Bank CEO Bob Diamond (who stands to still get [...]

I don’t think it was too much of a surprise that today’s hearing with Jamie Dimon was something less than stringent. Very few Senators bothered to show up with anything more than a list of questions and a pallid expression. The very structure of the hearing, with one round of five minutes of questioning, wasn’t [...]

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon faces the Senate Banking Committee in a two-hour hearing scheduled for 10am ET today. He’ll be the only witness. Keep in mind that Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase has given millions to top-ranking members of the Banking Committee, so anything more than headline-grabbing and grandstanding without a real challenge to Dimon in [...]

Housing Wire reports on bank attorneys preparing for “showdowns” with the RMBS working group on fraud cases. Well, they have to justify their billings to their bosses, don’t they? The reality of whether banks should sweat the investigation is far less clear. In fact, we have more information from a couple sources today that suggest [...]