The LIBOR Scandal

Barclays Manipulated Gold as Soon as It Stopped Manipulating Libor. If you were writing a paranoid fantasy of gold price manipulation you'd be hard pressed to come up with something more on the nose than the U.K.

Financial Conduct Authority's order against Barclays. It has everything; it is the benchmark of manipulation by which all future manipulation will be measured. Well, this or Libor. Delightfully, this manipulation occurred on June 28, 2012, the day after Barclays was fined 290 million pounds for manipulating Libor. They just really wanted to perfect their manipulating technique. And oh did they! In normal liquid markets, doing a bunch of selling to push the price down is an uncertain thing -- there might be buyers! Basically the way the fixing works is that the chairman of the little five-bank committee announces a price, and every bank announces its buying or selling interest, and the chairman moves the price up or down until supply and demand balance. The fix opened at 3:00 p.m. with a price of $1,562. So, what did we learn? ROLLING STONE : ROTHSCHILD CORRUPTION GOES MAINSTREAM.

Jacob Rothschild Rolling Stones ~”Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds, 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. Barry Soetoro. Banks Facing Suits as States Weigh Their Libor Losses. This Global Financial Fraud and Its Gatekeepers.

Last fall, I argued that the violent reaction to Occupy and other protests around the world had to do with the 1%ers' fear of the rank and file exposing massive fraud if they ever managed get their hands on the books. At that time, I had no evidence of this motivation beyond the fact that financial system reform and increased transparency were at the top of many protesters' list of demands. Day of Action against Bank of America. New York City, May 8, 2012. (photo: Sunset Parkerpix) But this week presents a sick-making trove of new data that abundantly fills in this hypothesis and confirms this picture. The New York Times business section on 12 July shows multiple exposes of systemic fraud throughout banks: banks colluding with other banks in manipulation of interest rates, regulators aware of systemic fraud, and key government officials (at least one banker who became the most key government official) aware of it and colluding as well.

And what, in fact, happened? New York Fed Knew of False Barclays Reports on Rates. 9:27 p.m. | Updated The Federal Reserve Bank of New York learned in April 2008, as the financial crisis was brewing, that at least one bank was reporting false interest rates. At the time, a Barclays employee told a New York Fed official that “we know that we’re not posting um, an honest” rate, according to documents released by the regulator on Friday. The employee indicated that other big banks made similarly bogus reports, saying that the British institution wanted to “fit in with the rest of the crowd.”

Although the New York Fed conferred with Britain and American regulators about the problems and recommended reforms, it failed to stop the illegal activity, which persisted through 2009. British regulators have said that they did not have explicit proof then of wrongdoing by banks. The revelations fuel concerns that regulators are ill-equipped to police big banks and that financial institutions can game the system for their own purposes. Timothy F. Mr. In response, Mr. Infographic: The Largest Banking Scandal in the World Explained. Libor: The Crime of the Century. The interest rate scandal surrounding England’s Barclays Bank is corruption like we’ve never seen it before.

Workers in London's City financial district. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) This story originally appeared at Truthdig. Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books). Forget Bernie Madoff and Enron’s Ken Lay—they were mere amateurs in financial crime. LIBOR Scandal Develops. Matt Taibbi: Libor Rate-Fixing Scandal "Biggest Insider Trading You Could Ever Imagine" This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We end today’s show with Matt Taibbi. He’s a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine. His most recent in-depth piece is "The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia: How America’s Biggest Banks Took Part in a Nationwide Bid-Rigging Conspiracy—Until They Were Caught on Tape.

" Matt Taibbi has also been closely following the Libor scandal. AMY GOODMAN: Matt Taibbi is with us here in New York. Matt, welcome to Democracy Now! MATT TAIBBI: Good morning. AMY GOODMAN: Explain Libor. The LIBOR Scandal Explained [Infographic] Use the social buttons to the right to share on popular social sites.

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