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U.S. banks moved billions of dollars in trades beyond Washington’s reach
This spring, traders and analysts working deep in the global swaps markets began picking up peculiar readings: Hundreds of billions of dollars of trades by U.S. banks had seemingly vanished. “We saw strange things in the data,” said Chris Barnes, a former swaps trader now with ClarusFT, a London-based data firm. The vanishing of the trades was little noted outside a circle of specialists. But the implications were big. The missing transactions reflected an effort by some of the largest U.S. banks — including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley — to get around new ... (full story)