Loading ...Hi Ipso,
Yep, their plan has worked perfectly – can’t have that pesky real money threaten their fiat.
Here’s a question – JPM was recently fined $900+ million.
Where does that money go? I can’t remember seeing anything at all about restitution to the victims of JPM’s crimes.
[snip] ….The JPMorgan case was part of a crackdown by federal prosecutors on illegal spoofing, where traders place bogus orders to move prices up or down and then quickly cancel them before they can be executed. Smith and Nowak used the technique to manipulate gold and silver prices from 2008 to 2016, or the entire duration of the period in which we said – and showed – that gold manipulation was rampant, for which were frequently mocked and ridiculed.
Convictions for Smith, Nowak and a third trader who was found guilty in November, Christopher Jordan, capped a string of wins by prosecutors in spoofing cases targeting some of Wall Street’s biggest banks, including Bank of America, Deutsche Bank AG and Morgan Stanley. Two former Deutsche Bank and two former Bank of America traders previously each received one-year sentences.
JPMorgan, the largest US bank and the biggest US financial criminal enterprise by far, agreed in 2020 to pay $920 million to settle the Justice Department’s allegations against it — the biggest fine by any financial institution accused of market manipulation since the 2008 global financial crisis.
Prosecutors also charged several members of the team Nowak led at JPMorgan. Three of them pleaded guilty and testified against Nowak and Smith. The witnesses described how Nowak and Smith routinely placed huge buy and sell orders they never intended to execute — part of their strategy to push prices in the direction that would profit the bank.
Christiaan Trunz, a former Smith protege and one of the traders who pleaded guilty and cooperated, told jurors that he learned to spoof by watching Nowak and Smith for years. When Trunz came under scrutiny for his own spoof trades, he said Nowak coached him to lie to compliance officials and later counseled him against pleading guilty as prosecutors were preparing criminal charges against top executives on the trading desk.
Trunz testified that Smith was so fast at placing and canceling bogus orders that his colleagues would joke that he needed to put ice on his fingers to cool them down.
“This was an open strategy on the desk,” said Trunz, who sat next to Smith and watched him click his computer mouse rapidly to place and cancel trades. “It wasn’t hidden.”