(Bloomberg) -- New York banking regulator Benjamin Lawsky
said his agency’s probe of electronic currency trading focuses
in part on a practice known as “last look,” a programming
feature designed to let banks delay execution of orders to avoid
getting burned on price swings.
“We’re concerned, at least, that there may be some issues there in terms of manipulation,” Lawsky, head of the New York Department of Financial Services, said Thursday in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “In the Loop with Betty Liu.” He’s trying to determine whether any banks abused last looks to ensure they profited at the expense of customers.
Last looks are a vestige of the era when computers began replacing people in executing currency trades. In those days, there was a lag between when an order was typed and when it executed, boosting the risk prices could shift and hurt the bank before the transaction was done. As that lag narrowed, banks retained the right to execute on a last-look basis.
Lawsky, whose office is among more than a dozen authorities investigating suspected currency rigging by the world’s largest banks, ordered Barclays Plc and Deutsche Bank AG last year to hire monitors to examine their foreign-exchange operations. A person with knowledge of the probe told Bloomberg News in December that Lawsky’s office had found evidence the pair may have used algorithms to manipulate currency rates. By that time, Barclays had its monitor in place, and Deutsche Bank was in the process of installing one.
Read more at Click here / www.trade4x.net
“We’re concerned, at least, that there may be some issues there in terms of manipulation,” Lawsky, head of the New York Department of Financial Services, said Thursday in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “In the Loop with Betty Liu.” He’s trying to determine whether any banks abused last looks to ensure they profited at the expense of customers.
Last looks are a vestige of the era when computers began replacing people in executing currency trades. In those days, there was a lag between when an order was typed and when it executed, boosting the risk prices could shift and hurt the bank before the transaction was done. As that lag narrowed, banks retained the right to execute on a last-look basis.
Lawsky, whose office is among more than a dozen authorities investigating suspected currency rigging by the world’s largest banks, ordered Barclays Plc and Deutsche Bank AG last year to hire monitors to examine their foreign-exchange operations. A person with knowledge of the probe told Bloomberg News in December that Lawsky’s office had found evidence the pair may have used algorithms to manipulate currency rates. By that time, Barclays had its monitor in place, and Deutsche Bank was in the process of installing one.
Read more at Click here / www.trade4x.net
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