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.

The financial crisis has given rise to record numbers of law suits.  But six years on, are we seeing the end of this litigation frenzy?  In an effort to answer this question, Fatan Sabry, Eric Wang, and Joseph Mani of NERA Economic Consulting have surveyed existing cases, settlement trends, and new filings looking for trends.  In an October 2013 publication, “Credit Crisis Litigation Update: It is Settlement Time,” the three authors take a quantitative look at recent trends in settlement activity, review some major settlements in credit crisis litigation, examine current trends in filings, and discuss mortgage settlements related to repurchase demands by mortgage sellers and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  While the study finds that the pace of new filings has slowed, and the size and number of settlements has increased, litigation arising from the financial crisis “far from over,” according to the authors.