Barclays fined for manipulating LIBOR rates

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.
...

Click to expand...

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.
...

Click to expand...

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.
...

Click to expand...

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.

Click to expand...

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.
...

Click to expand...

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?!

Click to expand...