Minute manipulation cost Barclays $43.8M
British bank Barclays is fined $43.8 million after a former trader improperly influenced gold prices.

Barclays has been fined more than 40 million dollars for manipulating the price of gold. U.K. regulators found that one of its former traders exploited weaknesses in the system to benefit the bank at the expense of a customer. Amazingly, he carried out the trade just one day after Barclays was fined 450 million dollars for trying to fix interest rates. Jim Borden joins us now with more details.
Jim, this sort of speaks volumes, I suppose, to the culture of bank steal.
It does indeed, I remember standing outside Barclays Bank that day, talking about manipulation of what's called libor, little that we know that one of their gold traders inside that building was very much manipulating the gold price at the gold fix, and he has been fined 160,000 dollars as well. His name is Daniel Plunkett. This is all come out of the press release from the regulators. They were very specific about how this happen. I guess that it's quite interesting. He saved the bank 3.9 million dollars in the one minute around the gold fix at 3 o'clock by manipulating the price just enough they didn't have to pay a client that 3.9 million dollars. The client, knew right away, complained, now taking a long time for this all to come out in the public, but the bank obviously has paid the client that money, they fined Mr. Plunkett, and he was banned from doing some trades for a while. Barclays, of course, all along in the last few years. Anthony Jenkins, the CEO, said we really cleaned up our act. We're not the bank that was there at the time. So they are saying that this won't happen again. Both the bank and Mr. Plunkett were fined, less than they normally would, but they agreed to settle them early. These are one of those incentives that the regulators have here in the U.K. They tried to get people to agree a fine early, that means they don't get fined as much, but Maggie, this is a problem London has been having for a couple of years. We are talking about interest rate, we are talking Libor, and we talking about gold fixing. London has laissez-faire attitude here, a self regulation when it comes to these markets that are heavily regulated. They are not like the stock market. And again, London gets stunned, so they have promised here to really crack down on all of this, sort of fixing that go on here. It's antiquated, you know, they have a phone call at ten o'clock, another, three o'clock. They fix the price, legally fix the price, and they all go to the pub.
Yeah, I think the problem, of course, Jim, is that, you know, while it's one person's action, and, yes, the system is antiquated, it needs to be updated. I think it takes away from most people that when given the opportunity, the culture in banking is still to cheat if you can, and worry about getting caught later. And that was so frustrating as we see here so long after what we saw go down in the financial crisis. You wonder what's going on for those who haven't sort of been noticed. It's disturbing. All right, Jim, thank you so much for that.