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A couple of readers asked me to comment on the news Regulator Fines Barclays Over the Pricing of Gold. A British financial regulator has fined Barclays $43.9 million after accusing a former trader at the bank of improperly influencing gold prices at the expense of a customer. The F.C.A. also fined the former Barclays trader, Daniel James Plunkett, £95,600 and barred him from participating in any regulated financial activity. The authority said Mr. Plunkett, who settled with it, had profited at the expense of a customer, who was later fully compensated by Barclays. Mr. Plunkett’s improper conduct occurred on June...

We can't ignore it anymore - the markets are rigged. The LIBOR scandal broke almost two years ago, and the banks found responsible for manipulating that key index are still dealing with lawsuits. Meanwhile, allegations of gold market manipulation have been simmering for over a decade and grew into an inferno after the spot price dropped dramatically last spring. Yet I'm left wondering what the conspiracy theorists hope to accomplish. Yes, I believe in exposing truth for its own sake and that the individual investor should have the same opportunities in the marketplace as the big institutions. But with these...

Bellando, a former investment bank analyst at JPMorgan, is the son of John Bellando, chief operating officer and chief financial officer at Condé Nast. His brother, John, a top chief investment officer with JPMorgan, works on risk exposure valuations. Several John Bellando emails were cited during testimony at the Senate Finance Committee’s inquiry into the bank’s losses during the infamous London Whale trade fiasco. Kenneth Bellando — who grew up in Rockville Center, LI, and was a Georgetown graduate — worked as a summer analyst at JPMorgan while in school. Upon graduation in 2007, he was hired as an investment...

(Reuters) - The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation sued 16 of the world's largest banks on Friday, accusing them of colluding to suppress interest rates. The lawsuit, filed in the federal district court in New York, was the latest to accuse financial institutions of conspiring to manipulate Libor, or the London Interbank Offered Rate. The FDIC said the defendants' conduct caused substantial losses to 38 banks that the U.S. regulator had taken into receivership since 2008, including Washington Mutual Bank and IndyMac Bank.

Mark Carney, the head of the Bank of England, and other officials from the BOE were put through a five hour marathon of questioning yesterday by Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee covering everything from how long the BOE plans to continue Quantitative Easing (QE), to the potential for Scotland to vote for its independence, to what it knew and when it knew it about the rigging of the Foreign Exchange market by colluding global banks. The bombshell of the day, however, did not occur during the session on the Foreign Exchange scandal, which is stacking up to be a more serious...

European Union lawmakers have pledged rapid approval of a draft EU law to regulate market benchmarks such as LIBOR, though they sparred over how comprehensive the new regime should be. Big fines for Barclays and other banks over the past 18 months for rigging interest rate benchmarks such as the London Interbank Offered Rate or LIBOR, prompted the European Union to propose the rules to supervise such indexes for the first time.The draft law proposes that an administrator is appointed to oversee how each major benchmark is compiled, ensuring there is a record of who contributed to it. …

Oversight of the LIBOR bank lending rate will be taken away from the City of London and transferred to Paris under a new plan currently being drafted by the European Commission. The proposal, due to be published in the summer, would see the regulation of hundreds of influential price levels, including oil and gold, transferred to the France-based European Securities and Markets Authority. …

Really odd. (Skip the Ad). Explanations?

While it’s often best not to engage with conspiracy theorists on their own turf, as you can probably never convince them, it’s worth setting the record straight on all the myths and phony evidence surrounding the Sandy Hook massacre.We’ve rounded up every major piece of evidence we could find that leads theorists to say the “official narrative” of events “doesn’t add up” and provided the facts that show why these questions can be easily explained. We’ve ignored the empty accusations with no evidence to support them (it was the Jews!) and focused only on the theories that try to present...

Libor scandal grows as the fathers of two mass murderers were to testify In the wake of the mass murders that took place in Newtown, Connecticut on Dec. 14, information on the shooter, and his family, is slowly being discovered by law enforcement other sources. One interesting connection to the tragedy that took place at the Sandy Hook school is that the father of Adam Lanza has a connection to the theater shootings that took place in Aurora earlier this year by James Holmes. Both fathers of the shooters were allegedly expected to testify in the Libor scandal that rocked...

A few things you won’t hear about from the saturation coverage of the Newtown, Conn., school massacre:Mass shootings are no more common than they have been in past decades, despite the impression given by the media.In fact, the high point for mass killings in the U.S. was 1929, according to criminologist Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections.Incidents of mass murder in the U.S. declined from 42 in the 1990s to 26 in the first decade of this century.The chances of being killed in a mass shooting are about what they are for being struck by lightning.Until the...

The picture below shows $15 trillion dollars worth of $100 bills on $10 million dollar pallets stacked on top of each other over an area that is one third larger than a regulation football field. An electronics van is parked between the stack and the Statue of Liberty. A single $100 million dollar pallet rests in front of the truck’s cab. See it?Recently, I reported that the Federal Reserve Bank (FED) secretly gave ten trillion dollars of interest-free loans to over a dozen European banks to shore up the Euro and keep them financially solvent. I later found out that...

The guy who openly admitted he was getting notification from the BOE to manipulate Libor, and was advising his traders appropriately, Barclays' COO Jerry del Missier, and who quit the same day as his boss Bob Diamond, has finally had his pay package revealed. The payoff to get him out and shut him up? £8,750,000. From SKY: The Barclays executive who presided over the falsification of the bank's Libor submissions is to receive a cash pay-off worth almost £9m in a move that will spark a political outcry. I can exclusively reveal that Jerry del Missier, who resigned as Barclays’...

Edwin M. Truman explains why the spreading LIBOR scandal has the potential of raising new doubts over the reputations for honesty of many large financial institutions.

America has a serious problem. The integrity of interest rates has been compromised. Free enterprise requires fidelity and trust. A banking cabal regularly conspires to rig rates benefiting large banks and their political allies. These actions almost certainly harm others. Collusion and market manipulation are reprehensible, but enough about Ben Bernanke and his merry price fixing elves at the Federal Reserve, let’s delve into the LIBOR scandal. For disclosure, I’m a bank underwriter. My employer has not been implicated (and almost certainly won’t be) and my department doesn’t use LIBOR. Nonetheless, note, the following observations are mine alone. We can...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Wednesday that he acted quickly and appropriately to deal with problems in a key global interest rate once he realized the rate-setting process was flawed. Geithner, who was then head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said during an interview with CNBC that he sent a memo in 2008 to British banking authorities outlining his concerns about possible manipulation of the London interbank offered rate (Libor). He also said he alerted U.S. regulators.

(snip) The LIBOR scandal is "so big I don't think people have got their minds around it," says Jim Rickards, a partner at JAC Capital Advisors and author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global. "This is the largest financial scandal I've seen in my career." If $500 trillion of swaps are based on LIBOR and the rate was manipulated by 10 basis points over five years, that's $2.5 trillion of fraudulent transactions -- more than the combined capital of the nation's five largest banks, Rickards explains. "Congress may have to step in to limit the damages because...

Rick Santelli on Monday tore into the mainstream media for ignoring the London Inter-Bank Offer Rate (LIBOR) scandal and chided them for wasting time on petty and useless headlines. Wait, what’s the LIBOR scandal? “LIBOR … is the average interest rate the world’s largest banks pay when they borrow money. And this figure … is used to price hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of financial instruments, from high-yield corporate debt to student loans,” Christopher Matthews writes for TIME Business. Simply put, LIBOR isn’t just some “financial services sector thing” — it affects the everyday interest rates associated with loans,...

Numerous people have asked me to comment on the LIBOR rate-rigging scandal. I have not done so previously because I had little to add. Zerohedge has done a fine job breaking every story. So have others.  I prefer to comment when I have an edge of some kind: a different angle, a different source, or if I can offer a more comprehensive analysis than other writers. As pertains to LIBOR, I still have no earth-shattering reports or breaking news. Rather, I am commenting because of repeated questions as to where I stand on the story. Given the nature and magnitude...

A major for Wall Street has been that this whole scandal over rigging LIBOR (a common index of bank borrowing costs that's used to price hundreds of trillions of derivatives), would be seen by regulators and prosecutors as a chance for a "do-over". And that seems to be happening. Ben Protess and Mark Scott at the New York Times report: The department’s criminal division is building cases against several financial institutions and their employees, including traders at Barclays, the British bank, according to government officials close to the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is...