After nearly a decade of litigation, eight major players in the traditional financial industry have agreed to pay a settlement of $68 million. Check out the following reports about this below.
Conspiring to raise interest rates
The banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and others, were accused of unlawfully conspiring with each other to artificially raise interest rates on specific municipal bonds.
This was done in an attempt to discourage investors from returning them for cash.
The banks were due to appear in court on August 7, but a request for an emergency order was granted by Judge Thomas Donnelly, allowing the settlement to be reached instead.
According to Bloomberg, lawyers representing Edelweiss Fund argued for double the amount of settlement money in a whistleblower lawsuit against banks at a Monday hearing.
However, Donnelly was not convinced and advised the plaintiffs to argue their case for a larger settlement at a briefing on September 15th.
The banks involved have not responded to media inquiries about the settlement.
An analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, Elliot Stein, estimates that the banks’ agreed settlement is only about one-fifth of the $349 million in damages sought by the plaintiffs.
“That’s a pretty good outcome for the defendant banks, especially if spread across the 8 of them. And it signals that the other False Claims Act cases in California, New York and New Jersey are manageable for the banks too if they’re unable to prevail on some of their remaining defenses.”
Billion-dollar debt could kill the US dollar
Recently, a renowned crypto analyst shared their belief that a particular on-chain metric suggests a promising future for the Bitcoin (BTC) price trend.
In a recent InvestAnswers YouTube video, the anonymous host analyzed Bitcoin’s yearly absorption rate on exchanges.
The analyst referred to an absorption chart from Glassnode, a crypto analytics company, which defines the metric as a comparison between the yearly exchanges’ balance change and the amount of BTC mined during the same period.
