The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever. Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology.
You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything. You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Lurid Subprime Scams Unveiled in Long-Running Fraud Trial.
Apocalypse, New Jersey: Matt Taibbi's Dispatch From Camden, America's Most Desperate Town. Everything is Rigged, Vol. 9,713: This Time, It's Currencies. As Bradley Manning Trial Begins, Press Predictably Misses the Point. Everything Is Rigged, Continued: EU Raids Oil Companies in Price-Fixing Probe. Deja Vu on the Hill: Wall Street Lobbyists Roll Back Finance Reform, Again. The Great American Bubble Machine. The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere.
The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. Invasion of the Home Snatchers. 'Zero Dark Thirty' Is Osama bin Laden's Last Victory Over America. Secret and Lies of the Bailout.