Call it scandal fatigue. A palpable sense of resignation now greets each fresh revelation of even the most colossal financial fiascos. Whether it is HSBC handing over £1.2bn in fines and charges for lax controls against money-laundering, Kweki Adoboli getting seven years' jail for rogue trading, or JP Morgan fessing up to over £3.5bn in losses from making supersize bets in the City, these debacles register but fail to generate the anger that the sums and the misconduct involved deserve. Perhaps outrage requires a hate figure to provoke it: a Fred the Shred, or a Bob Diamond. Yet if ever a banking scandal deserved to arouse public fury it is the one being uncovered at UBS over its part in rigging money markets. This week's details from regulators about just how flagrantly senior staff at the multinational bank went about fixing so-called Libor rates the interest rates that determine everything from the cost of your mortgage to the monthly loan repayments made by businesses and local councils make clear that the Libor scandal goes much further than a few rogue individuals or even a few rotten institutions. This is a far bigger scandal than the horrors unearthed by regulators at Barclays Capital over its part in the Libor fixing. There, investigators managed to nail 14 staff and were unable to show how the scammers actually profited from their scam. In the case of UBS, regulators have already caught 45 individuals, and found clear evidence of profiteering. As the £940m fine slapped on UBS this week (the second such fine, unbelievably against £290m for Barclays) demonstrates, this is a much bigger case. And crucially, it shows not just a few rotten apples but an entire rotten culture, where highly paid staff at some of the world's biggest banks and City dealers colluded in fixing quoted market prices. They did so blatantly through emails and internet message boards and cynically. "You know, scratch my back, yeah an all," reads one exchange from a banker to a broker at another firm. "Oh definitely, yeah, play the rules." They did it for personal gain: "I'll pay you, you know, 50,000 dollars, 100,000 dollars... whatever you want," reads another UBS trader's promise. The Swiss watchdog puts at $64m the clearly calculable profit made by UBS alone through just one year's tampering with Libor. And they did it in volume. The Financial Services Authority has totted up at least 1,900 occasions when UBS bankers asked their colleagues, other brokers and employees at other banks for Libor to be fixed for their gain. And those are only the written requests: the verbal demands would surely be at least as abundant. This corruption of one of the most prosaic things in financial markets was so widespread that senior managers either allowed it, or turned a blind eye, or were so negligent as to raise questions about whether they violated their fiduciary duties to shareholders. For the record, UBS went for years without proper supervisory controls on the department that fixed Libor. Yet this goes beyond a single Swiss bank, even one as large and ungainly as UBS. Over at taxpayer-owned RBS, Stephen Hester has been warning for months that he will soon need to surrender a massive fine to regulators. And the watchdogs themselves are investigating not only banks, but broker-dealers. An entire industry is now under a huge and very black shadow. And all this is happening just a few weeks before the yearly bonus-round. The official answer so far to misconduct has been chasing a few bad apples and fining the banks that house them. That is no way near enough. The fines paid by Barclays and UBS seem almost like the costs of doing business irksome, sure, but a punt worth making. It is surely time to talk about depriving major offenders of their licences to do some kinds of market activity. That may sound unduly punitive to some regulators, but consider: the Libor scandal is already proving to be one of the biggest in banking history and it has only just begun to unravel. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/20/ubs-libor-rates-scandal-banks What real use does fining them actually do? Where does the money from the fine literally and specifically go? If you are fining them, aren't you then simply taking the money that the earned in an illegal and ammoral way, anyway? Why not just finally put lots of the highest level one's, in a cold and stark cell, with only the most basic needs met. Not the usual lower level fall guys, all of the big players, get them all. That would impress ..... everyone.
What's a Libor and does it affect the price of Illinois natural gas or Idaho potatos? Is this a muslim/israel thing?
The answer to your question, is that they manipulate the markets against you all, so yes, that kind of thing v much does impact on you. People like you are who it is most meant to hurt.
LIBOR is simply the London InterBank Offered Rate, or the interest rate the leading banks in London charge to one another when engaging in borrowing.
Oh, I thought it was important. This is like what French banks charge each other affecting me. Would that be the Frogbor?
I think Poms have an overinflated sense of worth and influence. Please note that I don't know when their king or queen's birthday is or give a crap.
By Kenneth Shorthen jr., The Examiner In the wake of the mass murders that took place in Newtown, Connecticut on Dec. 14, information on the shooter, and his family, is slowly being discovered by law enforcement other sources. One interesting connection to the tragedy that took place at the Sandy Hook school is that the father of Adam Lanza has a connection to the theater shootings that took place in Aurora earlier this year by James Holmes. Both fathers of the shooters were allegedly expected to testify in the Libor scandal that rocked the banking world in June. The father of Newtown Connecticut school shooter Adam Lanza is Peter Lanza who is a VP and Tax Director at GE Financial. The father of Aurora Colorado movie theater shooter James Holmes is Robert Holmes, the lead scientist for the credit score company FICO. Both men were to testify before the US Sentate in the ongoing LIBOR scandal. The London Interbank Offered Rate, known as Libor, is the average interest rate at which banks can borrow from each other. 16 international banks have been implicated in this ongoing scandal, accused of rigging contracts worth trillions of dollars. HSBC has already been fined $1.9 billion and three of their low level traders arrested. FULL ARTICLE HERE
