2013-04-26rollingstone.com

LIBOR may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

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But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March -- though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all -- when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants' incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place.

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It's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop [the banks], even when they do get caught working together to game the system. If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati -- this is the real thing, and it's no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.

Woah, Matt Taibbi is even mentioning gold and silver manipulation now!



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