Good:
Regulators are investigating several groups of traders around the world for allegedly colluding to manipulate interest rates, according to a report.
The ongoing criminal and civil investigation is focused on more than a dozen traders from at least nine banks, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. They allegedly worked together in small groups to influence various interest rates on separate continents, the report said.
The traders under investigation are separate from the alleged collusion involving Barclays, which came to light in late June when the U.K. bank paid about $450 million and admitted that some of its traders and executives had tried to fix the London interbank offered rate, or LIBOR, and other interest rates. The rates are used to set payments on some $360 trillion worth of financial instruments, ranging from credit cards to more complex derivatives, such as futures contracts.
Advertise | AdChoicesBarclays is the only bank to admit any misconduct in giving false information in the complex process of setting LIBOR and other interest rates.
Other banks that have disclosed that they are under investigation for LIBOR manipulation include Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, and also HSBC, Deutsche Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Good ole squeaky clean Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase in the tick of things again.
utterdregs
“Good ole squeaky clean Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase in the tick of things again.”
That a Freudian slip, Cole, suggesting blood-suckery?
PeakVT
Good ole squeaky clean Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase in the thick of things again.
Both sides of the pond do it! Move along, nothing to see.
karen
I figured there would be a real investigation this time because RICH INVESTORS got screwed as well as peons like us.
schrodinger's cat
Apt metaphor for bankers, blood suckers that they are.
Brachiator
It’s a good day for prosecutions. Elsewhere:
Rumor has it that the flame haired Brooks grabbed a bow, shot out the tires of a police van, and shouted “I dinna wanna go ter jail!” before escaping from the area accompanied by an enchanted bear.
Jay in Oregon
If Dimon has a sad, I’m sure Congressional Republicans will be more than happy to tell him how awesome he is and how they wish he could be more like him.
c u n d gulag
Of course, it was JUST the traders – no one in upper management had ANY clue about the illegal chicanery!
Remind me again why we pay these Galtian Overlord CEO’s so much money, when they don’t have a feckin’ clue as to what their people are doing? (Like they don’t…).
Do they do a real spiffy job on the washrooms in the evenings to earn those 7, 8, or 9-digits salaries and bonuses?
This MYTH about the “Super CEO’s” needs to die fast, die now, and DIE HARD!
These feckin’ idjits couldn’t supervise the skeleton night-shift at a WaWa miles off the superhighway.
ASSHOLES!
AkaDad
This wouldn’t have happened if we had less regulation and oversight.
BGinCHI
It would be more efficient to put a bunch of traders and upper management in the cells at Riker’s Island and then see which ones want to talk.
Shouldn’t even take an hour to get to the bottom of it.
Ash Can
That’s good news. I hope they end up bagging a whole bunch of miscreants.
And OT, but still involving miscreants, this incident of a Wisconsin state senator admitting that the new WI voter ID law should help Republicans get elected makes me think about something. I don’t know if that Pennsylvania state pol’s moment of candor about voter ID laws winning the state for Mitt Romney had anything to do with the DoJ opening an investigation into PA’s law, but I will be watching to see if the DoJ starts asking some cheeseheads some uncomfortable questions in the wake of this.
dr. bloor
Oh goodie, another round of “Mistakes Were Made” in front of all the relevant Congressional committees followed by cash prizes and no jail time for the participants.
Richard
It I were to go down the block and attempt to rob a bank, I’d expect to get about 10-20 years in prison. Considering that these folks cheated people literally trillions of dollars, I’d be in favor in a punishment that was in proportion to their crimes. How about a few hundred thousand years each? Hopefully medical science will advance sufficiently to allow them to sit out their entire sentences.
Yutsano
@AkaDad: Lower taxes. Also. Too.
Lee
Just curious isn’t this an example of the ‘free market’ setting the interest rates as opposed to the Fed?
scav
Just to keep our MOTU arrogance meters pegged, if not ‘sploded, hark ye! to the attitude of Lord Green formerly of HSBC and his supporters: Lord Green ‘regrets’ HSBC scandal but still refuses to answer questions
Mittster has simply got to be soooooo jealous about this classless society bit on this side of said puddle. Still, they’ll probably swap strategy and tactical notes between Olympic events.
utterdregs
@Jay in Oregon:
And then they’d give him a “happy ending.”
trollhattan
@Richard:
That’s why you’ll always be a moocher(tm)–thinking too small. Creators(pbut) always super-size it.
/Wingnut Überklaße of 1987.
utterdregs
@Jay in Oregon:
And then they’d give him a “happy ending.”
Lex
Wake me when they start frog-marching guys in handcuffs out of the C suites on live TV.
Linda Featheringill
Oh. I’ve always thought that all bankers colluded in making life miserable for us poor schmucks. Was I wrong?
Donut
Careful, Cole. With that kind of mean attitude, your language will hurt Dimon’s Delicate Producer Fee-Fees and then he will really show us who is boss and give us teh what for by … Doing something REALLY bad to the economy! So there.
Hill Dweller
OT: Sen. Feinstein, after accusing the Obama WH of leaking classified material, apologizes for other people using her remarks to impugn Obama character. With friends like these…
Bill Arnold
@Richard:
You’re missing some zeros. Besides, jail sentence lengths are very roughly proportional to the log of the amount stolen. (If that.) I’m sure this is in white collar sentencing guidelines somewhere.
Willie Sutton is said to have said (but didn’t probably) that he robbed banks because that’s where the money is. …
Maude
Jump!
Roger Moore
@Bill Arnold:
The key thing is that theft by fraud is treated much more leniently than theft by violence.
Roger Moore
@Maude:
ITYM “Jump you fuckers“.
Bex
@scav: Lord Green is an ordained priest in the C of E and has written books about banking ethics. Oxymoron.
Ben Franklin
This is a case where ‘Gallows humor’ could actually be funny.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us? (formerly MarkJ)
@Jay in Oregon: Exactly, just another excuse for Republican congresscritters to kiss his ass.
BD of MN
Can someone explain to me how we the peons got harmed by this? It’s my understanding the banksters colluded to keep the LIBOR rate low, so it wouldn’t reflect badly on the individual banks. So if the rate was artificially low, wouldn’t that have kept all the credit card rates and ARM’s and everything else tied to LIBOR artificially low too?
I can see how it would depress interest paid on savings, but like most Americans, I have more debt than savings, so I’m having a hard time visualizing the harm of this, compared to the subprime mortgage scandal which evaporated trillions of dollars of home equity…
don’t get me wrong, I think the banksters should be treated like the criminals they are, and perhaps this is a chance to actually enforce some law that was broken, but I just don’t see the visceral damage this has done/is doing…
Maude
@Roger Moore:
I’m too lazy to type it all. It’s 92 here and humid.
gene108
If anything goes to a criminal trial, I’d love for these guys to be forced to use a public defender and see what kind of sentences they end up with, as opposed to their usual army of lawyers.
geg6
@BGinCHI:
THIS. And maybe a glimpse or two of the materials for waterboarding. Since, you know, it’s so effective at getting people to talk and all. You don’t actually have to do it because they’ll be pissing in their Brooks Brothers just at the thought.
jl
But Dimon is a self laundering CEO, so I imagine not in it for long. At least not him personally.
Maude
@Ben Franklin:
WIN
kay
Another complete ethical collapse in the finance sector.
It’s amazing that ordinary people still trust these bankers with our money. They’re banks! At the most basic level they’re places where people put their money!
One would think reputation would be important in that industry, but they simply don’t give a shit. They’ll lie and cheat and steal up to the moment they’re hauled out in handcuffs, I guess.
burnspbesq
@Brachiator:
This, too.
http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/tanned-fitzpatrick-bailed-after-facing-bank-fraud-charges-3179074.html
burnspbesq
@Lex:
Sean Fitzpatrick got frog-marched out of the Dublin airport this morning. Will that do for openers?
robertdsc-iPhone 4
@Richard:
Death by Hellfire missile fired from an MQ-9 Reaper drone works for me.
El Cid
@BD of MN: I think it’s partly that it directly damages the very notion that there’s some sort of free market business going on, and that banking is a part of it.
It’s not complex and hard to know what happened: something that was supposed to be a vaguely reliable, business-related figure was instead set according to open conspiracy by clownishly, openly selfish communication.
If taken at a serious level where one plays the role of someone who thinks there is a “system” to the system, it’s a level of conspiracy which threatens the very notion that there’s some market-driven basis to the actions of these institutions.
If taken at the level of appearance, it’s “HA HA WE’RE SETTING A FAKE RATE WHICH THE MORONS THINK IS REAL AND WE’RE DOING IT TO MAKE MONEY HA HA HA.”
It’s the equivalent of asking which would be worse for Ronald Reagan to be gleefully supporting genocide in Guatemala (that’s literally what he and our government did, fund, aid, and protect an active genocide, a label used by a post-genocidal investigation by a UN-led Truth Commission) or some incident in which Reagan was caught live on camera going “Hey, we’re going to help this general kill this innocent peasant girl, ’cause he needs a laugh!”
The former is surely the heavier crime; the latter would have a high likelihood of criminal investigation because of the active, conscious acknowledgement by the actor / Actor of malicious intent.
People who don’t want the stability of the banking system as a supposed center of objective market activity for investors to compete in and make use of according to supposed market information questioned by outsiders are therefore going to be very pissed off.
That the World Bank a few years ago investigated the role of Western big banks in illegal drugs trade money laundering and concluded that the global banking system could not have survived the crash without the narco-cartels’ hundreds of billions of dollars in those banks, well, that doesn’t piss high power types off as much.
Sending nations to their deaths and facilitating the slaughter of tens of thousands of Latin Americans and Asians for the profits of Western banks (only a tiny percentage of drug money stays within the exporting countries), in order to make that money and keep them banks afloat?
Pfeh.
Openly, bluntly, clumsily manipulating a supposedly objective, market-driven rate?
Arrest people!
trollhattan
@BD of MN:
Here’s Elizabeth Warren:
[edit: link]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/elizabeth-warren-libor-fraud-exposes-a-rotten-financial-system/2012/07/19/gJQAvDnDwW_story.html
Steeplejack
@BD of MN:
The problem is that the “somebody” on the other side of all those interest deals is losing money because they’re getting screwed out of their deserved interest rate. And that’s not necessarily just big evil banks. It could be pension funds, for example. My elderly and sainted mother has some pension-related thing that is tied to “LIBOR plus [something].” I remember being surprised that she had even heard of the word. So if someone is keeping the LIBOR artifically low, they’re screwing with my mother! Wolverines!
Maude
@burnspbesq:
I love the phrase, he had a busy morning.
BD of MN
@trollhattan:
Thanks for the link. This quote here is, I guess what I was looking for, showing some obviously criminal behavior instead of, given what I had previously heard, some CYA type behavior:
El Cid
My bad, it wasn’t the World Bank (though similar studies have been done by the IMF), but the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (from December of 2009):
The world’s richest, most prominent banks are part and parcel of many, many levels of the world’s criminal enterprises. They are, indeed, crooks. Institutionally, systematically. At root.
But then, that’s always been the beauty of Capitalism, is that it is indeed built upon the most hideous of crimes and theft, and we can be counted upon to forget all of that because we also know of people who worked very hard and were entrepreneurs.
There’s no one without the other. Never has been. Ever. Without the Americas, there was no industrial capitalism. Without the great powers destroying 3rd world rivals, there is no global capitalist expansion. Without Caribbean slave-based plantation crop production transplanted to the Americas, there is no American South.
Brachiator
@burnspbesq: Great headline:
It also looks as though they swooped in on a few other fish as well:
A nice start to the week, with a bit of justice being served.
Rathskeller
@BD of MN: if you have a pension fund, there’s a reasonable chance that your money was on the wrong side of this manipulation. Or your life insurance. On the phone, about all i can say.
Roger Moore
@BD of MN:
You mean other than the way it contributed to the financial crisis?
Gravenstone
@Ash Can: Except that the voter ID law currently has two separate injunctions in place against it. The law will not be in force this November, at a minimum.
El Cid
Ed Vulliamy mind-melds with me. Big international banks are fundamentally dependent upon money laundering. This isn’t any conspiracy theory. It’s not even a theory.
And that’s not even counting the Western governments assaulting 3rd world nations throughout the 1980s and 1990s for vast amounts of interest to fund their supply-side fantasy ‘reforms’ (“Austerity” regimes, “Structural Adjustment”) which they later had to apologize for for making problems worse, all after 3rd world poors paid ENORMOUS amounts of interest to already super-rich Western investors.
There you have it. It’s brief, it’s catchy, and true.
The 4 Pillars of the International Banking System:
1. Drug Money Laundering
2. Sanctions Busting
3. Tax Evasion
4. Arms Trafficking
burnspbesq
@Brachiator:
Agreed, but I’m not popping any corks until there are convictions.
BD of MN
a little background, the Mrs. BD works for the MN Atty General’s office, and her department is in the thick of all the mortgage stuff, dealing a lot with HAMP issues where the banks are still, to this day, actively fucking with people. The dual track problems; where one group at a bank is “working” to refinance a mortgage while another group at the very same bank is foreclosing on the home? Still happening. “losing” paperwork and having to resubmit documents repeatedly? Yep, still a favorite trick to this day.
So my point, if I really have one, is that this whole LIBOR thing lacks the punch, the immediacy, for me. Maybe I’ve just used up all the outrage I have at the moment…
James E. Powell
@Hill Dweller:
When was the last time Senator Feinstein was of any help to the Democratic Party? A senator that senior, and that immune from losing her seat, ought to stand for something other than ‘corporations are right about everything!’
What good is she, really? And to whom?
Lurker
@James E. Powell:
She’s one less Republican vote in the Senate. I voted for a different Democrat in the primary, but I will vote for DiFi this November to make sure the Republican doesn’t get the seat.
folsom ca
@James E. Powell: I constantly ask the same question, and question her as well. I want her to retire. There must be some democratic vow, that you will not run against a sitting dem. I think Jackie Spiere (sp) would be great. I bet there are a lot of dems waiting in the wings to get this seat. I regularly e mail her, I do not like her.
Heliopause
Not sure what exactly that means. I worked for a few years in a mid-level position in a private business, and it never would have occurred to me to do something dodgy without the express knowledge of my superiors because I thought it might be good for the company (to be clear, I wouldn’t have done anything dodgy, period). I can’t imagine any of the other mid-level people at that company doing any different, that is, “let’s break this rule, it’ll make money for the company, but don’t tell management.”
If executives of the approximate Rebekah Brooks level and above get charged I will be pleasantly surprised.
folsom ca
@Lurker: I am in moderation in a comment at 55, but I voted for the black mechanical engineer, i do not like di fi. I will vote for her, but with my nose held.
daverave
@Lurker:
I’m more of the mind to make her race as close as possible. She sucks.
Richard Shindledecker
I was disgusted when BarryO went on ‘the View’ to give Dimon a tongue bath but I’ll still hold my nose and vote for him in November – consider the alternative.
JR in WV
Oh yes, consider the alternative.
My whole voting life since I turned 21 back at the end of 1971, I’ve been voting for the lesser of two evils. And really, locally, nearly every county office holder has been indicted for some kind of vote fraud since we moved here in the late 1970s.
I really thought Bill Clinton was going to be a good one, and I suppose if he could have kept his zipper shut, or picked a more reliably silent girl friend, he would have done better. But really, the Rethuglicans were going to impeach him for, oh, anything, throw things at the wall til something sticks.
Vince Foster murder, drug smuggling, real estate dealing, they tried everything until they came up with a blue dress. With a stain…
But I’m pretty much OK with much of President Obama’s record, given the circumstances. He couldn’t close Gitmo without Congressional support. He’s done OK in the real war, and ended nearly the phony war in Iraq.
I gotta stop – it’s getting too late to type!
See ya,
me
Rathskeller
@BD of MN writes:
I think everyone’s outrage glands have been squeezed dry. So many things have gone wrong, and no one seems to be held accountable.
The short “fuck all bankers” way to summarize the LIBOR scandal is this: banks stole from their investors in the billions to hundreds of billions of dollars.
More generally, some banks lied about what they would do (their rates), because other banks had a side business (fixed income swaps) where they effectively sold bets on what the fixed income market rates would be. Because they were lying, the banks doing the side business made substantially more money. This money didn’t come into being like fairy dust, it came out of the pockets of counterparties, which include large pension funds, municipal and state governments, well-funded NGOs and charities. It came out the pockets of of otherwise savvy investors like Fortune 500 companies and virtually any company that tried to manage its interest rate exposure. So if you have a credit card or a mortgage, you’ve quite conceivably paid more money because of these crimes.
I don’t know how much money they stole. Fixed income swaps are about a $400 trillion industry (call it 33 times the US GDP). It will likely be in the billions.
bcinaz
Do the math; the banksters made BILLIONS rigging the LIBOR. If the penalty is only $450million than it was totally worth it and there is no disincentive – they’ll just move on to the the next thing, whatever that is.
Mino
@trollhattan: Hum, Barclays instituted a transactional tax, it seems to me, and the market did not implode. I wonder if our government could do that and recoup some of the money it paid(is paying) to the banks through the back door?
Mino
@El Cid: This.
Lex
@burnspbesq: It is, as the old joke says, a good start.