Currency Fraud - Tip of the IceBerg!

Treasury demand is drying up - the dollar is dropping - now fraud - what next? Check out a few more of my posts down the page to get a better understanding of the overall problems. Marshall Auerback's new post at Prudent Bear is excellent. Ol' Uncle Bush is going to get caught between a rock and a hard place - Unfinancible deficits? His choice - cut back rich tax gifts or Tax-Tax-Tax!

Currency Fraud Ran Deep, Officials Say

By JONATHAN FUERBRINGER and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

What began with an undercover F.B.I. agent's "posing as a bad guy with money" led to the discovery of rigged currency trading by traders at some of Wall Street's biggest banks, federal prosecutors said yesterday.

An 18-month investigation led to charges being filed against 47 people yesterday, a day after F.B.I. agents swooped into offices in downtown Manhattan to make arrests. Civil fraud charges were also filed against nearly half of the 47 by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and one was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission....

....Over a six-month period, federal officials said the five banks involved lost more than $650,000, of which $270,000 went to the traders at the banks and the interbank brokers who were involved....

....A troubling fact for the banks, investors and regulators is that the investigation showed, Mr. Comey said, that similar rigged trading involving bank traders has been defrauding banks for as long as 20 years. That history and the fact that so many individuals could apparently pull off the rigged trading and get caught only after an F.B.I. agent became involved may serve as warning: the largely unregulated foreign exchange market, with trading volume of $1 trillion a day, is vulnerable, and banks' internal controls may not be strict enough.

"What is astounding is that you have so many people involved," David Gilmore, a partner at Foreign Exchange Analytics, said. "That is a lot of ducks to line up to commit fraud." ....Article Continued