On February 1, 2021, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission charged a Tokyo-based swaps trader with manipulating U.S. dollar-based interest rate swap spreads. The complaint demonstrates the CFTC's focus on protecting the integrity of U.S. markets, including interest rate swap markets, from purposeful price manipulation, as well as the agency's increasingly sophisticated ability to reconstruct market conditions by analyzing large amounts of trading data. It is also indicative of the CFTC's continued willingness to assert jurisdiction over traders outside the U.S. whose trading affects U.S. markets, including U.S. price sources for instruments traded outside the U.S. Finally, the complaint underscores the major risks of making false statements to the CFTC, as well as the Commission's hostility toward the use of unrecorded and unmonitored communication platforms in connection with trading.

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