Wall Street Reaped Ruble Fortune on Clients Fleeing Russia
- Kazakh, Armenian banks acted as go-betweens, people say
- Other banks avoided trade for compliance reasons, people say
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Wall Street chiefs seeking to explain recent steep drops in trading revenue have reminded investors how lucrative things were a year ago: Goldman Sachs Group Inc. President John Waldron called 2022 “particularly strong.” Citigroup Inc. boss Jane Fraser said “everything was firing on all cylinders.”
Rarely mentioned is one of the reasons for last year’s boom: a billion-dollar windfall funneled from Russia through former Soviet republics to Wall Street’s currency traders.