Banks to Pay $5B for Rigging Markets

Five of the world’s biggest banks have agreed to pay more than $5 billion in fines and plead guilty to rigging global financial markets. On Wednesday, the Justice Department said Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, and the Royal Bank of Scotland will plead guilty to violating antitrust laws for traders who worked together to rig “the largest and yet least regulated market in the financial world, where some $5 trillion changes hands every day,” as The New York Times puts it. (The traders called themselves “the cartel.”) UBS will plead guilty to manipulating a rate known as LIBOR that sets the cost of trillions of dollars worth of loans like credit cards. No one was indicted for criminal prosecution, though.