Author: David Schwartz J.D. CPA
On November 25, 2015, the Chicago Public School Teachers’ Pension and Retirement Fund and other institutional investors filed a class action lawsuit in federal court alleging that ten of the world’s largest investment banks conspired to rig the lucrative interest rate swaps market. The suit filed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan accuses the investment banks of violating federal antitrust laws by colluding to create an anti-competitive stranglehold over the market for interest rate swaps for their own profit. Plaintiffs say the ten defendant banks, Goldman Sachs Group, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Credit Suisse Group, Barclays Plc, BNP Paribas SA, UBS, Deutsche Bank AG, and the Royal Bank of Scotland worked together to prevent the trading of interest rate swaps on electronic exchanges, creating a monopoly, and extracting millions of dollars in overpayments from trading clients.