Posted on 07/07/2012 2:15:35 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Hundreds of bankers across three continents are embroiled in the interest-rate fixing scandal that has left Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond fighting to save his job.
As pressure intensified on Britain’s highest paid banking boss to quit, MPs heard a string of other financial institutions across the world were under investigation.
At least 20 banks are believed to be under suspicion, with growing demands for a criminal investigation.
Barclays’ shares crashed by 15.5 per cent in a day as the implications sank in, wiping £3.7billion from its value, with other banks also hit.
Barclays has been fined £290million after devastating emails revealed that its traders manipulated the London Interbank Rate (Libor) – the rate at which banks lend money to each other.
Chancellor George Osborne told the Commons the exchanges ‘read like an epitaph to an age of irresponsibility’.
[SNIP]
Asked how much wider the rate-fixing scandal might go, the Chancellor told MPs: ‘HSBC and RBS are two of the banks under investigation, but international banks such as UBS and Citigroup are under investigation too, partly for activities conducted in this country.’
Mr Osborne said the total impact on the economy and on individuals was ‘extremely difficult to work out, because the Libor rate was manipulated up as well as down’. ‘Sometimes the rate was too low for the true market price, and sometimes it was too high,’
‘The Financial Services Authority has made clear, however, that that contributed to a risk to the country’s financial stability, and the cost of that is enormous.’
Tracey McDermott, director of enforcement at the FSA, said: ‘The initial indications are that Barclays was not the only firm that was involved in this.’
As well as RBS and HSBC, others under scrutiny include Lloyds, JPMorgan Chase, Germany’s Deutsche Bank and Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
This scandal is going to take down many more than just Barclay’s leaders. The claims are likely to be in the trillions. We are five years into a financial crisis and nothing has changed.
I had a loan pegged to the LIBOR. The fine is a joke.
I’ve been a fan of banks and the financial institutions in general. But I’ve always assumed they were playing with a fair deck. This just pisses me off. Bigtime.
...and there are still people ON THIS SITE that think bankers are honest.
How PATHETIC.
Let me get this straight. The Fed and Bank of England lower interest rates in an attempt to fight economic decline and LIBOR falls. Look at charts.
http://confoundedinterest.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/libor-fixing-and-the-fed-funds-target/
So why is this solely the blame of banks for LIBOR fixing. Can you look at those charts and say that The Fed had nothing to do with it?
Please.
It isn’t for a lack of some of us trying to educate people.
But some people can be very difficult to teach when they have a pre-conceived notion in their heads.
I’m shocked I tell you
Shocked that our banks would do such a thing......
So why is this solely the blame of banks for LIBOR fixing. Can you look at those charts and say that The Fed had nothing to do with it?
The Fed is a bank run by bankers. They’re all the same.
So why is this solely the blame of banks for LIBOR fixing. Can you look at those charts and say that The Fed had nothing to do with it?
The Fed is a bank run by bankers. They’re all the same.
and who provides oversight over these banks?? shouldn’t they also be targets of legal action and contempt by the public?
“It isn’t for a lack of some of us trying to educate people. But some people can be very difficult to teach when they have a pre-conceived notion in their heads.”
I know - like most people here, I almost always defer to the free market - but there are limits. Bankers have proven TIME AND TIME AGAIN that they simply cannot be trusted with the money of others. They proved it in Holland during the Tulip bubble (in the 1500s), they proved it in the First Depression, they proved it during the S&L Scandal, and they’re proving it again during Great Depression 2.
Some people simply need to be watched...it’s that simple.
The process that they use to set this rate is constantly manipulated. The fact that banks were communicating about those manipulations is hardly a surprise. In the end banks turn on one another by writing loans at discounts to these rates..so my guess is that nothing was really gained or lost by these manipulations..in the long run.
It's like a Bar Assoc. policing attorneys
.....or Eric Holder as attorney general
.
How much do you want to bet NO ONE goes to jail? I’ve caught flak before and have been call a communist and worse for saying this, but it won’t stop me from repeating it! The corner three card Monte dealer is more honest than most of the ‘Too Big to Fail’ banks and investment houses. And face it the Monte dealer who ‘scams’ a few hundred is a thousand times more likely to go to jail that the ‘banksters’ that are stealing millions.
There is a war on the free markets and it’s not just Obama, OWS, Big Labor and so forth, but Big banks and brokerage house are just as much at war. They repeated get caught steal millions and billions and yet no one ever goes to jail. Tell me what is learned if you cheat, rob, defraud a billion dollars and you get find a million? Hell you just write it off as the cost of doing business.
And no we don’t need any more laws we just need the laws that are in place now enforced and start sending people to jail and I ain’t talking ‘Club FED’ style prisons I’m talking the same prison the liquor store robber and the car jackers go to.
Everything you say about bankers is true.
Why conservatives know so little about financial markets and their history is a constant puzzle for me. Those of us who *do* know financial history and have a deep understanding of the markets know bankers are a wholly untrustworthy lot, given to maddening excesses.
That is a fool's play. Please be careful about the target(s) of your indignation, or you may very well get your wish.
Nobody will like that.
There is no fix in on LIBOR, Prime or any other index, except for the central banks' manipulation at their end. Talk about arbitrary!
Amen. It even goes back to biblical times, when it was dealing with crooked people providing ‘loans’. It’s nothing new - and it will NEVER CHANGE.
I’m as free-market as the next guy, but I have a problem with leaving child-killers in residential neighborhoods, on the assumption that if enough kids get killed, people will move out of those areas (the Libertarian view) - and all will be well. Likewise, when bankers have no problem taking down entire economies due to their greed, they must be stopped before that happens.
Of course LIBOR goes down when the Fed and the Bank of England lower interest rates. LIBOR is intended to reflect banks' cost of borrowing money in the interbank market. If the fed funds rate goes down, it is cheaper for banks to borrow money, and so LIBOR will fall. That's normal. What was different here was that banks (at least Barclays, and from press reports, likely many others) were lowering LIBOR rates to levels that did not reflect their cost of borrowing.
Well, I for on would like to see it.
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