Clifford Chance

New York Court Holds that Market Makers Trading With Each Other in Decentralized Financial Markets can be Prosecuted Criminally for Antitrust Violations

14 May 2018

On May 4, 2018, a federal district court in New York permitted criminal charges to go forward against three former currency traders accused of colluding to rig prices of currency pairs in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. In United States v. Usher, the court held that, among other things, the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, had pleaded a “hard core” horizontal cartel arrangement—a per se violation of the antitrust laws—between market-makers in the decentralized, over-the-counter spot market for foreign currency exchange, a two-sided market in which dealers regularly act as both buyers and sellers, including to each other.

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