With JPM having stolen the spotlight for every possible instance of fraud and market manipulation in the past year, it was easy to forget there are other prominent banks that engage in precisely the same deceptive practices as, well, everyone else. One such prominent bank is none other than everyone's old favorite bloodthirsty mollusc, Goldman Sachs, which in a filing reported that "currencies and commodities were added to a list of financial products and related activities that are subject to investigation. The filing also added options trading and technology systems and controls to the list." So, pretty much everything is being investigated.
Bloomberg reports [10] that "Investigators are looking at the firm’s “trading activities and communications in connection with the establishment of benchmark rates,” Goldman Sachs said in the filing. The company "is cooperating with all such regulatory investigations and reviews."
As noted above, Goldman is merely the latest bank to join pretty much everyone else, who is now under investigation.
At least eight banks including Citigroup Inc. (C) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) have said they are being investigated by authorities examining the $5.3 trillion-a-day foreign-exchange market and are co-operating. Citigroup, JPMorgan and Barclays Plc (BARC) have suspended or put on leave some of their most senior currency traders amid the inquiry. No one has been accused of wrongdoing.
The U.S. Federal Reserve is examining legal and regulatory exemptions that have allowed banks including Goldman Sachs to trade and own raw materials such as oil, coal and metals, a person with knowledge of the matter said last month.
None of this should be surprising. What should, however, come as a big shock is that while JPM reported it has not had one trading loss either in Q3 or all of 2013 to date, Goldman just announced it lost money on a far more realistic 23% of all trading days, or 15 of 64, in the quarter.
[11]
It seems that unlike JPM, Goldman is taking the government's fraud investigations seriously.