Foreign Exchange Antitrust Litigation

Plaintiffs allege that the world’s largest banks colluded to fix and manipulate the prices of foreign exchange (“FX”) transactions and related financial instruments. Through electronic chat rooms, Defendants shared the prices and spreads they quoted to customers, as well as proprietary order book information and the timing of FX trades. Defendants communicated confidential client information, such as key pricing thresholds to trigger clients’ automatic trades (i.e., stop-loss orders), and coordinated their trading to profit at their clients’ expense.

Dr. Singer provided expert testimony on market-wide anticompetitive harm resulting from increased adverse selection risk. Dr. Caves supervised and directed econometric analysis of  spread-widening, using hundreds of millions of second-by-second bid and ask quotes for 44 currency pairs, and also demonstrated stationarity and cointegration in FX pricing using transactional data from defendant banks. Dr. Caves also developed and implemented a statistical analysis demonstrating that the sharing of Sensitive Competitive Information (“SCI”) among Defendants was pervasive during the Class Period, based on an analysis of Defendants’ electronic communications.

In September 2019, the court granted class certification of the over-the-counter class on two matters: the existence of a conspiracy to widen spreads, and whether Credit Suisse (the lone non-settling Defendant) had participated in the alleged conspiracy. To date, settlements in excess of $2.3 billion have been secured on behalf of U.S. investors from 15 of the 16 Defendants.