Barclays fined for manipulating LIBOR rates

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http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000099274

U.K. bank Barclays will pay $453 million to U.S. and British authorities to settle allegations that it manipulated key interbank lending rates known as Libor, ramping up pressure on other banks to cooperate in a probe that could cost the financial industry billions of dollars.

Barclays admitted to trying to make Libor look artificially low, to avoid signaling the bank's distress to markets during the financial crisis. The bank also tried to manipulate borrowing rates to benefit its trading positions.

Barclays Chief Executive Bob Diamond acknowledged on Wednesday that the news would damage customer trust in the bank, and said he and other senior executives would forgo a bonus this year.

Libor underpins trillions of dollars in derivative contracts and is a crucial peg for corporate and personal borrowing rates worldwide, linked to everything from U.S. consumer credit cards to loans funding Turkish phone networks. The manipulation, from 2005 through 2009, meant that millions of borrowers globally paid too little or too much interest on their debt.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the U.S. Department of Justice and the UK's Financial Services Authority settled with Barclays on a civil basis, while Canadian authorities said they still had an open investigation.

The Justice Department also said it still had a criminal investigation in progress, having found that bankers across the industry worked together to manipulate Libor. In some cases the pressure to manipulate rates came from Barclays management, the Justice Department said.
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http://www.cnbc.com/id/47975538
 
It's been a phenomenal month for the Royal Bank of Scotland! First the "system upgrade" and now this:
RBS and Lloyds drawn into rate-rigging scandal

Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds have been accused of systematically rigging financial markets in a growing international scandal which wiped billions off the value of shares in Britain’s biggest banks.
...
The scandal now threatens to engulf taxpayer-funded Lloyds and RBS, which according to court documents obtained by The Daily Telegraph have also been accused of routinely distorting basic financial data used to set interest rates.

As British banks faced a potential criminal investigation billions were wiped off their value, with shares in Barclays falling by 15.5%. RBS’s share price plunged by more than 10 percent yesterday, wiping more than £2 billion off the value of taxpayers’ stake in the bank.

Executives at HSBC are also being investigated alongside London-based financial firms for their role in the scandal, which is estimated to have cost consumers, investors and businesses £30billion.
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More: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/...d-Lloyds-drawn-into-rate-rigging-scandal.html
 
I saw that. All they got was a wrist slap, when they should have had the flesh beaten off of their backs while tied to a rack in the town square. Until they start putting theiving bankers to death in horrific ways, such as burning them alive, the theft will continue.

The whole paradigm of paying a fucking fine without confessing guilt is altogether bullshit. If you or I stole the kind of money these guys are guilty of stealing both directly and through proxy means, we would be put in a steel box forever.
 
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Yeah, even Steven Segal gets this one - as long as the fines are less than the money they make cheating - they're just a small cost of doing business as usual. Till they really get an ass-kicking, nothing will change.

Strangely, since governments are so broke just now, they might start with real penalties just to fund themselves, business as usual might have a slightly tilting playing field in the next while...
 
yeah i wondered how they might divvy up the £290 000 000 fine ..............

probably agreed to pay it at £10 a month until things turn up a bit .

kinda odd that this doesnt get discussed at all in the mainstream meeja.
 
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only slightly off topic -

Big Banks Craft “Living Wills” in Case They Fail
By David Henry and Dave Clarke, Reuters – June 27 2012

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-banks-craft-living-wills-075041248.html


NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Five of the biggest banks in the United States are putting finishing touches on plans for going out of business as part of government-mandated contingency planning that could push them to untangle their complex operations.

The plans, known as living wills, are due to regulators no later than July 1 under provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law designed to end too-big-to-fail bailouts by the government. The living wills could be as long as 4,000 pages.
Since the law allows regulators to go so far as to order a bank to divest subsidiaries if it cannot plan an orderly resolution in bankruptcy, the deadline is pushing even healthy institutions to start a multi-year process to untangle their complex global operations, according to industry consultants.

“The resolution process is now going to be part of the cost-benefit analysis on where banks will do business,” said Dan Ryan, leader of the financial services regulatory practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers in New York. “The complexity of the organizations will shrink.”

JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM), Bank of America Corp (BAC), Citigroup Inc (NYS:C), Goldman Sachs & Co (GS) and Morgan Stanley (MS) are among those submitting the first liquidation scenarios to regulators at the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, according to people familiar with the matter .........
 
There are stories all over teh "alternet" about some 600 accountants and auditors that have been sworn to secrecy and put to work doing a forensic accounting of a major TBTF firm, and it is being whispered that it will be multiples of the size of Lehman Brothers. An announcement like that would cause the market to puke a few thousand points.
 
Barclays Plc sacrificed its chairman Marcus Agius over an interest rate rigging scandal that has dealt "a devastating blow" to the bank's reputation, apparently seeking to defuse calls for chief executive Bob Diamond to go.

Agius - who said "the buck stops with me" - is the first major scalp from the scandal, which is likely to involve more banks and could also embarrass regulatory authorities.

But Agius's departure from Britain's third-largest bank did not take the heat off Diamond, who was running Barclays' investment banking arm when the interest rate manipulation took place.

"The buck in Barclays stops with Bob Diamond, and it is Bob Diamond who must accept responsibility," said John Mann, a Labor politician who is part of a panel of lawmakers who will grill Diamond on Wednesday, and Agius on Thursday.
...
Fined $453 million by U.S. and British authorities, Barclays is the first bank to settle in an investigation which is looking at more than a dozen other banks, including Citigroup, HSBC, UBS and RBS.
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More: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/barclays-chair-quits-devastating-libor-061637797.html

The list of "other banks" under investigation here continue to grow...
 
...let me just reply here with a re-tweet of a re-tweet:

"So the RBS bank which is owned 82% by the taxpayers fined 150m for robbing taxpayers via Libor & the fine is paid by the taxpayer. WTF"

What we need, is to see senior banking heads rolling, big time, and not some "fines" and "settlements", paid by nobody in particular (meaning: by bank's customers and/or taxpayers), that will be laugh at all the way to the bank (pun not intended) - to collect another "performance bonus"...

WTF, since when it is that there is a financial settlement in a clearly criminal case (I believe financial frauds are covered by criminal, not civil law?)? I thought the settlements are only possible in civil, not criminal courts????
 
It is as if bankers are somehow immune to the law. So, they sacrificed their CEO on the altar of the Brotherhood of Darkness, stripped out a few Tier One assets to pay a small vig to the "regulators" and everything is supposedly 'jake'?

I am so sick and tired of this blatant corruption I( can't stand it! I want some heads on a fucking stick.
 
Sinclair seems to think this story is fairly significant...
Gold will go to and above $3500. This is the most important message I have sent you since 2001.
...
The Bank of England turning their backs on Barclays, the company who did their bidding, will be the event in time marking the trend change.
...
The battle to stop gold has been lost.

The start, like all starts towards the old high and well above, should be slow with more unfolding drama. It will build on itself but gold will trade at and above $3500. I am now as certain of this as I was over ten years ago when I told you gold was headed for $1650. I knew that as fact and to me from $248 gold was trading at $1650.

My job now is to define gold’s full valuation for you when it occurs. The timing is no less than one year from now to a maximum of three years from now. I believe I will be able to do that for you.

This is the most important message I have written you since early in 2001. I write this with total intellectual and spiritual certainty.
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More: http://www.jsmineset.com/2012/07/03/the-rig-is-up/

I was wondering about the LIBOR manipulation and if it affected PM lease rates at all.
 
Its a monster can of worms theyve opened and as the penny drops, more will come to realise how it fundamentally affected contracts and agreements.

Then its off to the Lawyers orifice to see if theres any possibility of redress .......

As i observed in a recent post, something has changed otherwise this would NEVER have been allowed to come to light.
 
I am listening to Bob Diamond right now and his testimony is prototypical bankster bullshit and obfuscation. Absolutely magnificent orator, but a fucking evil bastard nonetheless.

He has managed to prostrate himself before the MP's who are grilling him, without taking a single tiny portion of the blame.
 
There was a great headline in one of the UK tabloids recently -

'Sign On You Crazy Diamond'

(here in Blighty you 'sign on' when you loose your job, so you can get free money from those who are still working )
 
Could it be (as I've said here recently) that with world governments finally realizing how they are truly broke and business as usual simply cannot go on, they're finally turning on the old source of bribes for the real money now? In other words, are they finally finding a way to get some of that banker money back? Have they realized that even though they aren't competent to exercise it, they really do have the rule of law on their side, and the ability to make and enforce same, now that they actually need it (having ignored our need for it for however long)?

I mean, I have my doubts, but were I a gov idiot finally and truly backed into a corner, and looking for someone else to get the rope or blade before me, what would I do?

Could get interesting. Let's promote the meme at any rate - maybe they'll pick up on it.
 
British government leaning on the Bank of England, who in turn were leaning on Barclays to have lower LIBOR rates to make things seem not as bad back in 2008...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...-email-implicates-british-government-20120704

http://www.businessinsider.com/barclays-letter-on-bank-of-england-2012-7

http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...-out-about-the-libor-banking-scandal-20120703

"This email amazes for a few reasons. One, it suggests that Barclays, which is currently carrying the standard in the LIBOR-manipulation scandal, was actually bringing up the rear -- that all of the other banks were in on it, and Barclays only attracted the government's notice because they were last."

:popcorn:
 
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Sounds like Mr. Diamond was crafty enough to document the exchange in an email for posterity.

What I don't understand is how this investigation got started in the first place. If the BOE and Gov spearheaded a conspiracy on this, why did they allow this media circus to get off the ground?
 
...DCFusor might be up for something, saying that it might be orchestrated... It very well might be, that things up above our heads are getting really nasty, and as my great-grand dad used to say, "you think they are your good friends? OK, I'll keep you lot locked in one room without food for seven days, and you will all learn if you really are!". In short, they might start biting each other for scraps, these "old boys" club members.
 
quote from DCF -

Could it be (as I've said here recently) that with world governments finally realizing how they are truly broke and business as usual simply cannot go on, they're finally turning on the old source of bribes for the real money now? In other words, are they finally finding a way to get some of that banker money back? Have they realized that even though they aren't competent to exercise it, they really do have the rule of law on their side, and the ability to make and enforce same, now that they actually need it (having ignored our need for it for however long)?

I mean, I have my doubts, but were I a gov idiot finally and truly backed into a corner, and looking for someone else to get the rope or blade before me, what would I do?

Could get interesting. Let's promote the meme at any rate - maybe they'll pick up on it.

banksters trump pols .......... dont they ?
 
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In good times, bankers DO trump pols. In bad times, perhaps not so much...in bad enough times, most power flows from the barrel of a gun...and the organization best set up to use them, with the closest-in control over the military/police.
 
Love this chart:
http://www.silverdoctors.com/lieborgate-a-picture-chart-worth-1000-words/

"Rather damning chart, is it not? In the midst of the 2008 financial panic, with LIBOR rates spiking over 7%, they collapse overnight to practically zero, where they remained for the next 4 years.
LIBOR ranged between 2-4% in 2005 for goodness sakes! Does any rational market observer believe JP Morgan and Bank of America are less of a credit risk in 2012 than they were at the height of the bubble in 2005!?!?!"

:popcorn:
 
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.
...
Citigroup and JPMorgan also acknowledged private civil and class-action lawsuits filed against the Libor-setting banks beginning in April over the issue.

The suits have been assembled together into one action proceeding in the New York federal district court.
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More: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/07/libor-rate-fixing-scandal-spotlight-now-on-citi-jpmorgan/
 
how long before savers realise theyve been shafted by artifically low LIBOR rates ?

And hopefully, collectively, start a class action ?
 
Was Gold Manipulated Like Libor Rates?
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/gold-manipulated-libor-rates-111608428.html

'The scandal surrounding the fixing of the Libor has opened markets up to "more scrutiny and more investigation," Naylor-Leyland said.

He expects to see revelations over the next few months that the price of gold (Exchange:XAU=) was also manipulated because "gold and silver reflect the true value of money the same way interest rates do."'



Wow, are people actually waking up and taking a hard look a the world?!

:popcorn:
 
benjamen said:
Was Gold Manipulated Like Libor Rates?
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/gold-manipulated-libor-rates-111608428.html

'The scandal surrounding the fixing of the Libor has opened markets up to "more scrutiny and more investigation," Naylor-Leyland said.

He expects to see revelations over the next few months that the price of gold (Exchange:XAU=) was also manipulated because "gold and silver reflect the true value of money the same way interest rates do."'



Wow, are people actually waking up and taking a hard look a the world?!

:popcorn:
Click to expand...

Interview on CNBC discussing this idea:
http://www.silverdoctors.com/ned-naylor-leyland-on-cnbc-gold-manipulated-like-libor/
 
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/insight-fed-knew-libor-issue-051658815.html

"The Federal Reserve Bank of New York may have known as early as August 2007 that the setting of global benchmark interest rates was flawed. Following an inquiry with British banking group Barclays Plc in the spring of 2008, it shared proposals for reform of the system with British authorities."

"More than a dozen banks are being investigated for their roles in setting Libor, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Deutsche Bank, HSBC Holdings Plc, UBS and Royal Bank of Scotland."

"According to the calendar of then New York Fed President, Timothy Geithner, who is now U.S. Treasury Secretary, it even held a "Fixing LIBOR" meeting between 2:30-3:00 pm on April 28, 2008. At least eight senior Fed staffers were invited."

:noevil:
 
...you better shut up, you sorry bunch of conspiracy theorists :rotflmbo:

Who's the conspiracy theorist now?
 
Theory becomes fact after enough successful predictions and testing, is all.

So, conspiracy theorists become conspiracy fact-finders (and prophets) in the transition, if their theories were actually correct.

Some remain theories or are proved wrong in the end, as well, perhaps the bulk of them. The good 'ol scientific method works in a lot of cases other than finding sub atomic particles and new proteins and DNA sequences and meta-materials and on and on.

I think it's pretty cool.
 
Over 4 years ago, the FED and the Bank of England knew that LIBOR was being manipulated:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/libor-they-all-knew--and-no-one-acted-7942451.html

"An unnamed Barclays employee told a New York Fed analyst, Fabiola Ravazzolo, on 11 April 2008: "So we know that we're not posting, um, an honest Libor."

The New York Fed said that, immediately after the call, Ms Ravazzolo informed her superiors of the information, who then passed on her concerns to Tim Geithner, who was head of the New York Fed at the time. Mr Geithner investigated and drew up a six-point proposal for ensuring the integrity of Libor which he presented to the British Bankers Association, which is responsible for producing the Libor rate daily.

Mr Geithner, who is now US Treasury Secretary, also forwarded the six-point plan to the Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King."

:noevil:
 
Sounds like Geithner was clueless and out of the loop on the collusion that was happening. The Bank of England didn't want a six point plan. They wanted the dishonest Libor.
 
Good, simple breakdown of the LIBOR issue
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ignore-the-libor-scandal-at-your-own-risk-2012-07-17

"1. Regulators, worried that the financial crisis was seizing up the credit markets, asked the banks to make it look as if credit was more plentiful and cheaper than it really was (something the industry may have been doing on its own prior to the request).

2. Banks fudged Libor, one of the key corporate interest rates, making the rate look lower. In reality, the banks weren’t really offering those rates, or more likely, offering credit at all.

3. Because Libor was a benchmark, the banks that colluded on the rate now had inside information on which direction the rate could go. That means they could bet on a corporate-debt derivative knowing that the underlying rate would go higher, lower or stay flat."

:popcorn:
 
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