Assistant Attorney General, Leslie Caldwell, Speaking at Press Conference May 20, 2015

When the U.S. Department of Justice held its press conference on Wednesday to announce that five mega banks were each pleading guilty to a felony charge, paying big fines and being put on probation for three years, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Leslie Caldwell specifically took a battering ram to the reputation of Swiss bank, UBS.

Four banks — Citicorp, a unit of Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays — pleaded guilty to an antitrust charge of conspiring to rig foreign currency trading while UBS pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud for its earlier involvement in rigging the interest rate benchmark, Libor.

In explaining why the Justice Department was ripping up the non-prosecution agreement it had negotiated with UBS in December 2012 over its involvement in the Libor fraud and now charging…

Not in the U.S.!

LONDON — Banks have paid billions. Regulators and prosecutors have extracted guilty pleas from financial institutions. Dozens of employees have been fired, and at least one chief executive has lost his job.

Now, on Tuesday, the first trader in the sprawling, half-decade-old investigation into the rigging of global benchmark interest rates will go on trial in Southwark Crown Court.

The British authorities have charged Tom Hayes, a 35-year-old former trader from Citigroup and UBS with eight counts of conspiracy to commit fraud. Mr. Hayes’s indictment claims that he was a ringleader among more than a dozen traders engaged in what the authorities say was a brazen attempt to manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, a reference rate used to set various others, including those for student loans and mortgages.

Mr. Hayes has pleaded not guilty to all eight charges. His lawyer…

Go Elizabeth!!!

NEW YORK (Reuters) – US Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling for U.S. Department of Labor hearings on whether banks accused of rigging foreign exchange markets should be allowed to manage retirement accounts, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

“When banks plead guilty to a crime, federal agencies must do more than look the other way,” Warren told the Financial Times. “The SEC has already granted waivers to each of these banks without any detailed explanation, but it is not too late for the Department of Labor to hold a public hearing before it decides that such brazen lawbreakers can be trusted managing workers’ retirement accounts.”

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/elizabeth-warren-is-calling-for-public-hearings-on-banks-2015-5#ixzz3b7y536d9

After years of criticizing regulators for lax enforcement of securities law, Elizabeth Warren finally has an outspoken ally on the inside pushing for a crackdown on Wall Street offenders.

Kara Stein, the junior Democrat on the Securities and Exchange Commission, has quickly become one of its more ruthless enforcers, making trouble for Wall Street, and aligning herself with Warren’s views as part of a powerful regulator that polices the financial industry.

Stein has opposed giving free passes, or waivers, to badly behaving financial companies so that they can keep doing certain types of business as if nothing happened. Before she started dissenting, the waiver approval was often a routine formality at the SEC.

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Though she may not have the Massachusetts senator’s star power or political ambition, Stein has rattled financial companies, several banking lobbyists said.

“If you have a motion for a waiver pending before the SEC, Stein is…