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"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
- Noam Chomsky
Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, discuss why nobody is freaking
about LIBOR in America, while JP Morgan caught doing an Enron on US
energy markets and GlaxoSmithKline pays 10% of their ill-gotten gains
for bribing doctors and scientists across America. In the second half of
the show Max talks to Kevin Sara of the TuNur solar export project of
Tunisia about solar exports from the Middle East and toxic derivatives
exports from the City of London.
as far as i'm concerned, the libor scandal is the last straw... many trillions of dollars have been literally stolen from people around the world and if this goes unpunished, we might as well kiss our asses goodbye because we will be forever owned by our super-rich elites and the criminal bankers...
The harsh light of the Libor rate-fixing scandal has crossed the
Atlantic, with both Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase saying regulators and
investigators have requested information from them in a so-far
preliminary probe of the case.
Share prices for both — as well as Bank of America, which has not
said if it was asked for information — have fallen sharply this week
amid worries they could be in line for the type of heavy fines laid on
Britain’s Barclays Bank, at the center of the scandal.
break out the rakes and hoes... it's time to go on the attack...
Robert Scheer on Libor: Modern international bankers form a class of thieves the likes of which the world has never before seen - on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend
how massive does the fraud have to be, how many trillions of dollars does it have to involve, how many millions of people have to be ripped off, and how many more of these mega-crimes have to surface before these global criminals are stopped, and by stopped, i mean arrested, indicted, convicted and put away...?
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.
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
financiers. 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.
"Viewpoint" host Eliot Spitzer, Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone contributing
editor, and Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets,
analyze the Libor interest rate--rigging scandal engulfing the banking
industry.
Barclays CEO Bob Diamond recently resigned after the
bank was fined $453 million for its part in the scandal, which involved
manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), a key global
benchmark for interest rates, by essentially "faking their credit
scores," according to Taibbi. And as Taibbi explains, Barclays couldn't
have acted alone.
"It can't just be Barclays and the Royal Bank
of Scotland. In fact, it can't even be four banks or even five banks,"
he says. "Really, in the end it's probably going to come out that it's
going to be all of them ... involved in this. And that's what's critical
for people to understand: that this is a cartel-style corruption."
Kelleher
argues that the Libor scandal is proof that the financial industry "is
corrupt and rotten to its core." "The same executives [using] the same
business model that crashed the entire financial system in '08 are still
running these banks," he says.
why does accountability and the rule of law only apply to the peasants...?
The LIBOR manipulation story has exploded into a major scandal overseas. The CEO of Barclays, Bob Diamond, has resigned in disgrace;
his was the first of what will undoubtedly be many major banks to walk
the regulatory plank for fixing the interbank exchange rate. The Labor
party is demanding a sweeping criminal investigation. Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, responded the way a real public official should (i.e. not like Ben Bernanke), blasting the banks:
It is time to do something about the banking system…Many people in
the banking industry are hardworking and feel badly let down by some of
their colleagues and leaders. It goes to the culture and the structure
of banks: the excessive compensation, the shoddy treatment of customers,
the deceitful manipulation of a key interest rate, and today, news of
yet another mis-selling scandal.
The furor is over revelations that Barclays, the Royal Bank of
Scotland, and other banks were monkeying with at least $10 trillion in
loans (The Wall Street Journal is calculating that that LIBOR affects $800 trillion worth of contracts).
The banks gamed LIBOR for two semi-overlapping reasons. As noted here last week,
there were instances of Barclays traders badgering the LIBOR submitters
to "push down" rates in order to fatten their immediate bottom lines,
depending on what they were trading or holding that day. They also
apparently rigged LIBOR downward in order to produce a general
appearance of better health, essentially tweaking their credit scores a
few ticks upward.
Most intriguingly, or perhaps disturbingly, there were revelations last week that Bank of England deputy Governor Paul Tucker had a conversation
with Diamond at the peak of the crisis in 2008. The conversation
reportedly left Diamond, and subsequently his traders, with the
impression that the bank had carte blanche to rig LIBOR downward in
order to help allay spiraling public fears about the banks’ poor
financial health.
British officials, and Tucker individually, deny that Tucker gave
Diamond permission to rig rates. But a report by British regulators did
conclude that the two were talking about Barclays LIBOR submissions on
October 29, 2008, and that as a result of that conversation, Diamond
came away with a “misunderstanding.” The Daily Mail quotes the Financial Services Authority report:
However, as the substance of the telephone conversation was relayed
down the chain of command at Barclays, a misunderstanding or
miscommunication occurred.
This meant that Barclays’ submitters believed mistakenly that they
were operating under an instruction from the Bank of England (as
conveyed by senior management) to reduce Barclays’ Libor submissions.
That is explosive stuff. Members of Parliament will be grilling
Tucker tomorrow about those events in what is sure to be a far more
combative and entertaining legislative inquiry than the Jamie Dimon dog-and-pony show we just went through here in the states in recent weeks.
The implications of that part of the story should be particularly
chilling to Americans, who in recent years have been party to a number
of revelations about strange and seemingly inappropriate contacts
between senior regulatory officials and big bankers during the heat of
the crisis.
We know that American officials in 2008-2009 were extremely concerned
about the appearance of weakness in the financial markets, so much so
that they may have resisted pursuing criminal prosecutions
against big banks, and we also know that they spent a lot of time
commiserating with Wall Street figures before and during the crisis.
If Bob Diamond and Paul Tucker were having these talks about LIBOR,
is it fair to wonder what else Hank Paulson and Lloyd Blankfein were
talking about in the 24 discussions they had in the six days following the AIG disaster? When Paulson had a secret meeting with the entire board of Goldman Sachs
in, of all places, his hotel suite in Moscow, in June of 2008? Or what
other material nonpublic information was exchanged when Paulson met with a gang of hedge fund chiefs
at the offices of Eton Park management in July 2008, and laid out for
them a possible scenario for putting Fannie and Freddie into
receivership?
[...]
This story is so outrageous that it shocks even the most cynical Wall
Street observers. I have a friend who works on Wall Street who for years
has been trolling through the stream of financial corruption stories
with bemusement, darkly enjoying the spectacle as though the whole
post-crisis news arc has been like one long, beautifully-acted,
intensely believable sequel to Goodfellas. But even he is just
stunned to the point of near-speechlessness by the LIBOR thing. “It’s
like finding out that the whole world is on quicksand,” he says.
evidently, with the latest breaking scandal involving barclays and the manipulation of the libor rate, joseph stiglitz has had enough...
Nobel Prize winner and former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz has
called recent revelations that Barclays and other large banks colluded
to defraud their costumers by artificially leveraging international
interest rates a "textbook illustration" of how banks use privileged
information and lax oversight to reap rewards for themselves while
savaging the wider societies in which they operate.
In an interview with The Independent
on Monday, Stiglitz argued (with Barclay's as just the most recent
example) that bankers -- without threat of prosecution or jail time --
would continue to use their elevated status to exploit weak regulations,
consolidate power, and avoid accountability.
The scandal at Barclays claimed the resignation on Sunday of Chairman
Marcus Agius after traders at the bank admitted manipulating Libor, a
baseline interest rate used by banks to set lending costs around the
world and which acts as the benchmark, according to an estimate by Reuters, on $350 trillion in derivatives and other financial products.
Stiglitz argues, in paraphrase by interviewer Ben Chu, "that breaking
the economic and political power that has been amassed by the financial
sector in recent decades, especially in the US and the UK, is essential
if we are to build a more just and prosperous society. The first step,
he says, is sending some bankers to jail."
the lack of accountability and the wholesale refusal to apply the rule of law to our criminal super-rich elites is nothing less than outrageous...
Hello, I am a current JPMorgan Chase employee. This is an open letter to all commissioners and regulators. I am emailing you today b/c I know of insider information that will be damning at best for JPMorgan Chase. I have decided to play the role of whistleblower b/c I no longer have faith and belief that what we are doing for society is bringing value to people. I am now under the opinion that we are actually putting hard working Americans unaware of what lays ahead at extreme market risk. This risk is unnecessary and will lead to wide-scale market collapse if not handled properly. With the release of Mr. Smith’s open letter to Goldman, I too would like to set the record straight for JPM as well. I have seen the disruptive behavior of superiors and no longer can say that I look up to employees at the ED/MD level here at JPM. Their smug exuberance and arrogance permeates the air just as pungently as rotting vegetables. They all know too well of the backdoor crony connections they share intimately with elected officials and with other institutions. It is apparent in everything they do, from the meager attempts to manipulate LIBOR, therefore controlling how almost all derivatives are priced to the inherit and fraudulent commodities manipulation. They too may have one day stood for something in the past in the client-employee relationship. Does anyone in today’s market really care about the protection of their client? From the ruthless and scandalous treatment of MF Global client asset funds to the excessive bonuses paid by companies with burgeoning liabilities. Yes, we at JPMorgan that are in the know are fearful of a cascading credit event being triggered in Greece as they have hidden derivatives in excess of $1 Trillion USD. We at JPMorgan own enough of these through counterparty risk and outright prop trading that our entire IB EDG space could be annihilated within a few short days.
[...]
It is rather surprising that what should be well known liabilities on our balance sheet have not erupted into wider scale scrutinization. I call all honest and courageous JPMorgan employees to step up and fight the cronyism and wide-scale manipulation by reporting the truth. We are only helping reality come to light therefore allowing a real valuation of our banking industry which will give investors a chance to properly adjust without being totally wiped out. I will be contacting a lawyer shortly about this matter, as I believe no other whistleblower at JPMorgan has come forward yet. Our deepest secrets lie within the hands of honest employees and can be revealed through honest regulators that are willing to take a look inside one of America's best kept secrets. Please do not allow this to turn into another Enron.
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