Just caught this article.
Apparently banks have been working together to fix interest rates. This does not surprise me, I have written at length about the international banking cartel.
What does surprise me is that the media seems to be surprised that interest rates are manipulated.
Perhaps they missed it, but the Bank of England publicly announces its manipulation of interest rates regularly and the media is not shocked an appalled.
Something is very wrong with this picture.
Here are some excerpts from the articles
More banks could be caught in the scandal which saw Barclays pay £290 million to settle claims that it used underhand tactics to try to rig financial markets, as politicians focus on the bank’s boss Bob Diamond.
The Financial Services Authority (FSA) disclosed that it had a number of other investigations under way in the wake of the allegations that Barclays manipulated the rates at which banks lend to each other.
“We have a number of investigations that are ongoing,” Tracey McDermott, the FSA’s acting director of enforcement and financial crime, told BBC’s Newsnight.
“Obviously we need to look at each case on its own particular facts but the initial indications are that Barclays was not the only firm that was involved in this.”
Meanwhile former Barclays chief executive Sir Martin Taylor said the bank should explain who knew what about the practices.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday that “somebody at senior level somewhere will have known.”
http://www.cnbc.com/id/47975538
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.
Barclays was fined a record £290 million for repeatedly distorting basic financial data which are used to set interest rates on millions of loans and other transactions around the world.
Bob Diamond, the Barclays chief executive, said he will give up his multi-million-pound bonus over the scandal but faced calls to resign amid claims that his bank’s actions posed a threat to the global market system.
As MPs suggested that a criminal inquiry should be held, financial regulators warned that other major British banks may also have been involved in attempts to manipulate data about interest rates. Up to 40 global banks face being named and shamed as part of the investigation.
The scandal relates to the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), the interest rate that banks pay on money they borrow from one another.
The Libor rate is one of the basic pieces of information on which trillions of pounds of financial transactions are based. It helps determine the interest rate that is applied to loans, including some mortgages, credit cards and business loans.
Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond today faced demands for his resignation and shares in the bank slumped by eight per cent after it was fined a record £290million for rigging interest rates.
Labour leader Ed Miliband today called for a criminal investigation into the scandal which is set to engulf a number of other top British banks.
Mr Diamond has agreed to give up his bonus following the scandal, which involved Barclays and other banks fixing crucial interest rates to mask the scale of their bad debts.
But pressure is growing for him to quit, and the value of Barclays shares fell dramatically today at the prospect of future instability at Britain’s third-largest bank.
It follows the release of devastating emails which show how bonus-hungry traders promised each other bottles of Bollinger champagne to fix the figures which affect millions of homeowners and small firms.
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