Libor Scandal: Barclays Blows The Whistle On America's Finan

[styky]

Libor Scandal: Barclays Blows The Whistle On America's Financial Giants

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... iants.html

[styky]

Dude! Casual sounding bankers' emails tell chilling story of financial misdeeds
By Robert Barr, The Associated Press | June 28, 2012
LONDON - The emails sound casual: Dude reaching out to dude, begging for favours and offering rewards ranging from coffee to fine champagne.

But what the bankers were allegedly doing was as serious as it gets: fixing an interest rate that affects the cost of half a quadrillion dollars — that's $554 trillion — in financial contracts around the world, from mortgages to loans.................http://www.canadianbusiness.com/article ... l-misdeeds

[styky]

UK orders bank review

Avril Ormsby, REUTERS

First posted: Saturday, June 30, 2012 09:26 AM EDT | Updated: Saturday, June 30, 2012 02:41 PM EDT
LONDON - The British government ordered an independent review into the workings of key lending rates between banks, after Barclays was found guilty of rigging them, and summoned the bank’s boss to answer questions about the scandal.

U.S. and British authorities fined Barclays $450 million US for manipulating the London Interbank Offer Rate (Libor), the interest rate on loans that banks make to each other. Barclays was the first to settle in an investigation that is expected to name others and reaches across Europe, Japan and North America...............http://www.torontosun.com/2012/06/30/uk ... ank-review

[Edward Kennedy]

The financial system is corrupt.

I recall in the eighties interest rates for mortgages rose to 18% and I knew people with 100,000 dollar morgages for renewal who walked into the bank and gave the keys to the manager.

Figures if your interest alone is 1500 dollars a month that it makes no sense to waste dollars trying to pay this amount.

So what happened?

I had a talk with a very astute fellow who told me that the banks correlated the best time when the common factor of renewal of one, two, three, four, five, ten, twenty and thirty year mortgages synchronized at the date most would be up for renewal and they manipulated the rates to be at the top at that specific time.

I believe it for sure, just as I believe that precious metals are being manipulated down when the uncertainty of the future would regularly have the prices of gold and silver rising. I think this is a last ditch attempt to maintain their control of the financially corrupt system they are in fear of losing as things happen across the globe and their empires come tumbling down so they can no longer be leeches feeding off the rest of us who work and produce.

[styky]

LIBOR: the “Mega-Scandal of All Mega-Scandals” Is Upon Us

http://endthelie.com/2012/07/05/libor-t ... s-upon-us/

[styky]

New bank misdeeds show financial industry in need of overhaul

Diane Francis Jul 6, 2012 – 5:06 PM ET
Banksters are being exposed one after another for indulging in widespread interest rate manipulation, power market collusion and municipal bond bid rigging.

All these allegations are disheartening so it was with some relief that, on the other hand this week, scientists announced they had found the ‘‘God particle’’, whatever that is. Unfortunately, no one can define this or describe where it is, but it’s certainly missing on Wall Street, the City of London and the world of finance.

The most recent scandal concerns the Libor, an acronym for the London inter-bank offered rate, which affects the setting of worldwide interest rates. Police and regulators maintain major banks around the world gamed this process to profit. Heads have fallen at Britain’s Barclays Bank PLC over this, the institution has been levied with a US$450-million fine for its shenanigans and its stock plunged 16%........................http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/0 ... -overhaul/

[Julian]

....and Conrad Black went to jail? He is a choirboy compared to these criminals, ... and I'll wager not one of them is prosecuted for criminal wrong doing.

[backhoe]

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2012/07/06/double-or-nothing/#comments


Double Or Nothing
July 6, 2012 - 4:45 pm - by Richard Fernandez

The Economist magazine has an article which says almost the same thing as Belmont post The Anatomy of a Lie, which was published on July 2. In the Anatomy of a Lie I argued that the fundamental problem with the discovery that LIBOR was being fixed is that it meant the financial system was based on bad data. Why is this a catastrophe? Because much of what you believed about value and who possessed it was false...

Yep:
2. RWE

In the book The Big Short the way in which the bundled securities based on mortgages were assessed for risk was described.

So you start out with a bunch of mortgages handed out to people who have little or no chance of repaying them based on their actual credit history and income level.

No problemo! You just bundle those in with mortgages issued to illegal aliens who have some income as itinerant farm workers and which have NO credit history at all, since officially they do not even exist. So, unlike the rest, they have NO negative credit history. Presto chango, may I have the envelope please? The investment is now rated AAA! Taaaa daaa! We are all rich!

Then there is this:
4. JFSanders

The only thing bothering me is the fact that Reality has yet to show up at this party. Is he being fashionably late? Or have we entered the Twilight Zone?

Well, actually one other thing is bothering me. I get the fact that a whole lot of pain is about to be laid upon the masses, but for those of us at or near the bottom of the crab bucket will we really notice a difference? My family didn’t really understand all the hulabaloo about the Great depression because we already lived that way before the crash.

I hope Biden gets the kharma bus though, just because he is a doofus.

[styky]

The LIBOR Scandal: The Rotten Heart Of Finance

http://www.economist.com/node/21558281

[Ogopogo]

http://www.thenation.com/article/168751 ... e-century#

Libor: The Crime of the Century
Robert Scheer
July 6, 2012


Workers in London's City financial district. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
 
This story originally appeared at Truthdig. Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books).
 
Forget Bernie Madoff and Enron’s Ken Lay—they were mere amateurs in financial crime. The current Libor interest rate scandal, involving hundreds of trillions in international derivatives trade, shows how the really big boys play. And these guys will most likely not do the time because their kind rewrites the law before committing the crime.
About the Author
Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer, a contributing editor to The Nation, is editor of Truthdig.com and author of The Great American Stickup...
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Modern international bankers form a class of thieves the likes of which the world has never before seen. Or, indeed, imagined. The scandal over Libor—short for London interbank offered rate—has resulted in a huge fine for Barclays Bank and threatens to ensnare some of the world’s top financers. It reveals that behind the world’s financial edifice lies a reeking cesspool of unprecedented corruption. The modern-day robber barons pillage with a destructive abandon totally unfettered by law or conscience and on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend.

How to explain a $450 million settlement for one bank whose defense, in a plea bargain worked out with regulators in London and Washington, is that every institution in their elite financial circle was doing it? Not just Barclays but JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and others are now being investigated on suspicion of manipulating the Libor rate, so critical to a $700 trillion derivatives market.

Caught as the proverbial deer in the headlights, Barclays Chairman Robert E. Diamond Jr. resigned this week and offered a plaintive defense to the British Parliament that he learned only recently that his bank was manipulating the index on which so large a part of international trade is based. That is plausible only if we assume he was paid $10 million a year to be deliberately ignorant. The Wall Street Journal had exposed this scandal fully four years ago but his bank continued to participate in it nonetheless.

“Study Casts Doubt on Key Rate” was the headline on the May 29, 2008, investigative report, which concluded: “Major banks are contributing to the erratic behavior of a crucial global lending benchmark, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows.” Even then, according to the report, it was known that the Libor rate was being manipulated “to act as if the banking system was doing better than it was at critical junctures in the financial crisis.”

Fast-forward four years to Diamond’s testimony before Parliament this week in which the CEO claimed his recent discovery of a pattern of interest manipulation by Barclays had made him “physically sick.” Who was to blame? According to the executive, subordinates acting behind his back.

The American-born banker, who has dual citizenship in the United States and Britain, is well versed in financial chicanery, having started by putting together derivatives packages at Credit Suisse First Boston back in 1996. He was compelled under parliamentary questioning Wednesday to admit that “I can’t sit here and say no one in the industry [knew] about the problems with Libor. There was an issue out there and it should have been dealt with more broadly.”

He couldn’t deny widespread chicanery within his bank because, as in the collapse of Enron a decade ago, investigators had uncovered an e-mail record of market manipulation so glaring that if the top executives were unaware, it was because they didn’t want to know.

As the New York Times editorialized: “The evidence, cited by the Justice Department—which Barclays agreed is ‘true and accurate’—is damning. ‘Always happy to help,’ one employee wrote in an email after being asked to submit false information. ‘If you know how to keep a secret, I’ll bring you in on it,’ wrote a Barclays trader to a trader at another bank, referring to their strategies for mutual gain. If that’s not conspiracy and price-fixing, what is?”

The US Justice Department made a deal with Barclays, and although it may prosecute some individuals in the scam, it agreed not to go after the bank itself. “Such an agreement makes sense only if that cooperation will allow prosecutors to nail other banks that have been involved in setting the rates, including potential cases against Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and HSBC,” the Times editorial said.

Both Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase were reported by the Wall Street Journal years ago to be suspected of rigging the Libor interest rate. The leaders of those banks, despite such media exposure, clearly remained confident enough to continue on their merry way.

The sad reality is that they will probably get away with it. The world of high finance is by design as obscure and opaque as the bankers and their political surrogates can make it, and even this most recent crack in their defense of deception will soon be made to go away.

Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books).

[styky]

New York Times, Gretchen Morgenson Applaud British, Issue Challenge To American Regulators Over LIBOR Scandal

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/bl ... z20FJlTb6s

[styky]

LIBOR-Gate Will Take Down Many More Bankers, And The Claims Will Spiral Into The Trillions
http://www.businessinsider.com/david-ko ... eek-2012-7

[Julian]

...and nobody will go to jail, except maybe a part time teller from one of the banks.

[Edward Kennedy]

...and nobody will go to jail, except maybe a part time teller from one of the banks.

...and this is the danger for the stupid controlling system. Do they expect fools and criminals like mcsquinty and other politicians, aided and abetted by the fasps, and the injustice system, to get off scot free for their criminality and the regular grass roots citizenry to not lose respect, and hate and rebel against it all?

Why should a rich family be able to rob and steal and swindle yet a man stealing a loaf of bread for his family be drawn and quartered?

The stupid stooges persecute Bruce Montague, lie and steal, persecute Linda Gibbons and Mary wagner, and enable criminals in Caledonia and then wonder why they are becomong hated more and more?

Give your freakin headsa shake you system aholes.

[styky]

LIBOR Scandal Set to rock U.S. as Experts Warn It Could Be 'the Biggest Consumer Fraud in History'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... story.html