Tom Hayes

  • 08 Feb 2013 at 1:36 PM

UBS Libor Manipulator Should Have Had His Lawyer Girlfriend Screen His IMs Too

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You can question some of the life choices that Tom Hayes, a/k/a Trader A, UBS’s Libor-manipulating-est Libor manipulator, has made, but this seems to me inarguable:

Citigroup executives wooed him in June 2009 at a swanky bar in Tokyo. As they showered him with praise, say people who were there, Mr. Hayes rarely spoke, instead letting his girlfriend, a lawyer, answer questions.

Shady traders: date lawyers! And let them do all the talking for you.

That detail is from this amazing Wall Street Journal article about Hayes. When we last discussed Hayes and his totally open and casual requests to people he’d just met to manipulate Libor for him, I asked “is this: (1) all of these people did not fully realize that they weren’t supposed to be doing what they were doing, (2) UBS’s culture was one of complete lawlessness and fuck-around-ery, or (3) both of those things are true and reinforce each other?,” and per the Journal the answer is fascinatingly (3).

I’ve occasionally said that Hayes made a career of Libor manipulating but that’s not entirely right. He started at RBS and, per the Journal‘s account,1 spent his time there mainly being smart and dressing “like a college student — with washed out jeans, a polo shirt and sometimes a threadbare sweater” rather than IMing people to ask them to fix Libor. (That, at RBS, seems to have come later.) Then he moved to UBS: Read more »

  • 19 Dec 2012 at 3:50 PM
  • Banks

Sometimes UBS Traders Manipulated Libor Just To Mess With Each Other

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The last of the UBS Libor settlements to come out was the U.S. one and it has some of the best quotes. There’s the yen swaps trader who said “I live and die by these libors, even dream about them.” There’s … I mean, there is the life and career of Bart Chilton, in toto; here is a thing he said:

“A Conscience Isn’t Nonsense”

Statement of Commissioner Bart Chilton on UBS Settlement

December 19, 2012

Every so often, folks wonder if some in the financial sector believe that having a business conscience is nonsense. Financial sector violations are hurtling toward us like a spaceship moving through the stars. All too often, penalties have been a simple cost of doing business. That needs to change.

Particularly good are the exhibits to the criminal complaint against Tom Hayes and Roger Darin. We’ve previously met Hayes, cleverly disguised as Trader A; he was the senior yen swaps trader at UBS in Tokyo. Darin was the short-term rates trader “in Singapore, Tokyo, and Zurich,” though probably not all at once; he and his team submitted yen Libors for UBS. You can guess what happened when they got together!

But you don’t have to guess because there are lots of transcripts of their chats in the exhibits.1 Here is a problematic one: Read more »