The Financial Post reports in its Wednesday edition the U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether banks, including Bank of Nova Scotia, manipulated prices of precious metals such as silver and gold as it pushes to wrap up probes into currency-rate rigging. A Bloomberg dispatch to the Post says at least 10 banks, including Barclays, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank, are being probed by the Justice Department's antitrust division. Precious metals have come under scrutiny as authorities around the world investigate allegations that other financial benchmarks have been rigged. Switzerland's antitrust regulator said Tuesday that it opened a preliminary probe into the possibility of price fixing in the precious-metals market. The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority is continuing to scrutinize firms' behaviour in relation to precious metals as part of continuing supervisory work spurred by the foreign-exchange probe. While the FCA does not have authority over physical markets, it does regulate derivatives. In that context, it ordered Barclays to pay 290 million pounds in May for a former trader who artificially suppressed the price of gold in 2012 using fake positions to avoid triggering a payout to a client.