Scandal roiled the banking industry Wednesday as four of the world’s largest banks — Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland — pleaded guilty to federal antitrust violations for conspiring to manipulate foreign-currency markets over the course of several years. The scheme involved collusion by traders at the various banks to fix the U.S. dollar – euro exchange rate by coordinating trades and agreeing not to buy or sell at certain times to protect one another’s trading positions.
The guilty pleas place the banks on probation and require them to pay criminal fines totaling more than $2.5 billion, in addition to billions more that they have agreed to pay to state and federal regulators. One of these penalties — a $925 million fine levied against Citigroup — is the largest single fine ever imposed for a violation of the Sherman Act (the federal statute that criminalizes price-fixing and other horizontal conspiracies among competing businesses). The guilty pleas were also historic in that they were entered by the banks’ parent companies rather than by subsidiaries — marking the first time since the Drexel Burnham Lambert scandal of the late 1980s that the primary banking unit of an American financial institution has pleaded guilty to criminal charges. …