Defending the Barrier

It’s been almost two years since the Federal Reserve fined six banks a total of $1.85 billion for misconduct in the FX markets.  Last week, Deutsche Bank joined the list, with the Fed fining DB $137 million. 

In this latest order, the Fed added a new form of misconduct, by DB, to its prior summaries of transgressions by the other banks – barrier running.  

Barrier running had never been part of the Fed's previous settlements, but the OCC did cite barrier in its settlements.  Here though, the Fed's language includes a new detail: not just the triggering of barriers, but also the defending of FX barriers.

Thus, not only might DB have regularly acted to trigger a market level that would hurt its trade counterparty (or client), but it may have actively worked to stop a level being hit to the degree that a movement in the FX pair would be harmful to the bank's pre-existing contractual exposures.

Barrier-running (and defending) by dealers is problematic: akin in some ways to front-running, dealers here would be taking advantage of their knowledge of (confidential) customer information, generally pursuant to private contracts the customer would have entered with the dealer: with barrier-running, dealers attempt to “knock out” customers from their FX exotic options positions; or in defending barriers, dealers would “knock in” and activate customers’ options.  

Importantly, dealers would be engaging in a form of market manipulation, steering the market for their peripheral benefit (here to take advantage of derivative contract exposures) as distinct from, say, simply trying to profit from a specific underlying instrument being mispriced. 

“Deutsche Bank’s deficient policies and procedures prevented it from detecting and addressing unsafe and unsound conduct by certain of its FX traders, including in communications by traders in multibank chatrooms, consisting of: ... discussions on trading in a manner to trigger or defend certain FX barrier options within Deutsche Bank, in order to benefit Deutsche Bank….” (per the Fed's C&D order, with emphasis added) 

The following table updates fines and settlements for FX misconduct pertaining to benchmark fixings (i.e. excluding “Standing Instruction” and “Last Look” settlements).  The total now exceeds $12.3 billion.