Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Bankers - Get out of jail card free

"What’s the most basic service banks provide? Borrow money and lend it out. You put your savings in a bank to hold in trust, and the bank agrees to pay you interest on it. Or you borrow money from the bank and you agree to pay the bank interest. How is this interest rate determined? We trust that the banking system is setting today’s rate based on its best guess about the future worth of the money. And we assume that guess is based, in turn, on the cumulative market predictions of countless lenders and borrowers all over the world about the future supply and demand for the dough...

...Suppose the bankers are manipulating the interest rate so they can place bets with the money you lend or repay them – bets that will pay off big for them because they have inside information on what the market is really predicting, which they’re not sharing with you. That would be a mammoth violation of public trust.

That's what the scandal over “Libor” (short for “London interbank offered rate”) is all about. Libor is the benchmark for trillions of dollars of loans worldwide – mortgage loans, small-business loans, personal loans. It’s compiled by averaging the rates at which the major banks say they borrow.

So far, the scandal has been limited to Barclay’s whose defense has been that every major bank was fixing Libor in the same way, because every major bank participates in setting the Libor rate, and Barclay’s couldn’t have rigged it without their witting involvement.

There are really two different Libor scandals. One has to do with a period just before the financial crisis, around 2007, when Barclays and other banks submitted fake Libor rates lower than the banks’ actual borrowing costs in order to disguise how much trouble they were in.

The other scandal is even worse. It involves a more general practice, starting around 2005 and continuing until – who knows? it might still be going on — to rig the Libor in whatever way necessary to assure the banks’ bets on derivatives would be profitable. This is insider trading on a gigantic scale."

Where is the jail time?

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-wall-street-scandal-of-all-scandals-2012-7

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