Is the gold market rigged?

Barclays has been fined £26m after one of its traders manipulated the gold fix. Is it time to overhaul the price-fix system and what are the alternatives? Simon Wilson investigates.

What's happened?

Barclays has been fined £26m after one of its traders manipulated the 'gold fix' the twice-daily process whereby a panel of London bankers sets an agreed benchmark gold price to avoid paying out $3.9m to one of its customers on a complicated options deal that was tied to the benchmark price.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.